Faking it until I make it

Sometimes facing my fear and getting the courage to push through is worse than the fear itself. If you want to find out if you have a fear of rejection or failure, get a disability, it seems to come naturally.

 I assume because I am low vision, that I am unemployable or that if I am indeed employable that folks won’t hire me because I have this condition.  I assume the world at large is mostly inflexible and condemning.  The truth is it is ME that is inflexible and condemning.  I have been my own worst critic and obstacle.  I seem to be geared toward self-sabotage in this area. 

The truth is I actually faced my fear last month and went and substitute taught for a math class.  Guess what?  It went just fine.  I could read the plans, study the material and actually teach the class.  And since teaching that class I have applied to another district and am in the process of getting my application for yet another to be on their substitute teaching lists.

Sometimes dialing back to what is can be more beneficial the FEARING what is.  This is what I know to be what is: I have a substitute teaching authorization, I get phone calls for jobs, and no one has said ANYTHING about me not being qualified.  Even after having taught in classrooms and divulging to staff and students that I am low vision, I have not been black listed.  

The bottom line is that this is where the phrase “Fake it until you make it” comes in.  What that means is that I continue to go through all the motions:  apply, get on lists, answer calls, and work as a substitute and each time I go through all the motions I will eventually feel comfortable in my own skin and be okay with where I am at in this process.  One day I will feel qualified and capable even with my vision loss. But in order to get there I have to do the work, show up, and see that time and time again I truly can do this and I am qualified, in spite of how I feel.

Acceptance, we seem to continually revisit this.

I am starting to learn that acceptance is not a static state.  It is a dynamic state, just like my eye condition.  Some days are great and some are not so.  I guess my goal is to not go so high and so low but to find that balanced spot in the middle.  I saw my RS recently and as always we do a bunch of diagnostic tests to see where things are at physically.  My overall acuities improved.  I was actually able to read the 20/50 line with my right eye and the 20/70 line with my left.  Sounds better right?  Sounds like improvement?  In the doctor’s office, reading letters off the lines is the ONLY place that improvement is seen.  My day to day life has not changed.  How I perceive the world hasn’t changed.  As a matter of fact how I “see” in my everyday life hasn’t had any detectable difference since May 2011, when my eyes declined.  I have had reading everywhere from 20/50 to 20/200 and it doesn’t seem to matter in the rest of my world. 

Here are some examples of my world and how I see. I drove by this open field today that used to be a corn field.  However, there were these mini-goal posts all over the field.  It wasn’t until I got a different angle that I realized that they were shadows cast by bales of hay.  I have had bales of hay look like cattle lying down in a field as well.  Basically, until I can “see” otherwise sometimes my world is just plain warped.  Another, warped example would be those long flags at the edge of a gas station or other store.  I swore they were waterfalls.  And then my brain was like “seriously, didn’t we just turn off all exterior water because we are getting into the ‘freezing’ weather”.  Again, until I caught a different angle I couldn’t gather they were just flags rippling in the wind.  I am hoping that one day I’ll think “waterfall” and my brain will say “no, most likely flag”.  It is almost like learning a new language.  In my world, color and perception are messed up most of the time and it all depends on how much light, the angle of the light, and the angle of the object/s that I am observing.

Basically I need to accept that regardless of the observations in the doctor’s office, my world outside of that office hasn’t changed in almost 2 years.  I need to just embrace that reality and do everything I can to adapt to it.

Trust God, or freak out

I am so glad that I have options.  The last several weeks have really been a test to see if I will let go of the things that I cannot control and truly trust God with the results of ALL of it.  See my problem is I can relinquish 75% control, maybe 80%. But when I have to really TOTALLY let go, it is hard. As someone said recently, “You can tell the things I have let go of, they have a lot of scratch marks on them.”

I need to LET GO of the future of my eyes, easy, right? No, not really.  I have a condition that has NO prognosis, NO decent data that shows discernible trends, NO promise of a good visual outcome, nothing.  All I have is today and where I am at today.  That is it.  Seems a lot like hurdling oneself off a cliff and saying “I have the parachute, if I need it, but for now we are just going to free fall.”  Your job is to NOT freak out and pull the rip cord too early. That gives you a lot of mental space to, um how shall we say this, FREAK OUT.   I have all this time to think about hitting the ground without ever touching the rip cord.  Oh, and my depth perception is way off which means objects are either closer or farther away then they appear.  Yippee skippy, life does not get any better than this.

Today, this is all I know, I had an injection last Thursday and will be having one at least quarterly.  For now, I can accept injections four times a year.  And in between injections, I will continue to do as much vision rehabilitation training as possible.