The Summer I Turned Invisible

I have monocular vision. It’s a fancy term for saying that my brain relies on my dominant right eye to see, causing my left eye to turn inward when I try to focus.

My parents took me to the eye doctor, and I was three when I started wearing a flesh-toned adhesive patch over my right eye to train my brain to use my left eye. I didn’t like the patch. People looked at me when I wore it, and it didn’t work. By kindergarten, I got glasses with thick brown frames that matched my hair. I liked my glasses because I could see better, I was told my left eye didn’t turn in anymore, and people stopped looking at me.

I was five when I started playing tennis. Despite my visual shortcomings, I had excellent hand-eye coordination and was a natural athlete. When I played, I wore a black elastic strap that wrapped around the back of my head and attached to the temples of my glasses. It reminded me of dental headgear the “dorks” wore in movies, so I stopped wearing it and pushed my glasses up after every point. I spent my entire childhood playing tennis, and I got good. Very good. And people started looking at me again.

I wore the same style of glasses until this jerk Troy called me ugly in the 7th grade. It was supposed to be an exciting school day because we were going on a field trip to see a play. After a lively and loud bus ride to the theater, we enthusiastically entered the venue and filed into our assigned rows. I entered my row and walked to find my seat in the middle. As I stopped at mine, the boy sitting directly behind me screamed at me, “You are so f***ing ugly!” I was stunned, but aware that I was in public with my peers. I rolled my eyes at him and sat down without saying a word. I stared straight ahead into nothingness and stiffened into concrete while my heart pounded and pounded and pounded. The play started. The actors’ lips were moving, but I didn’t know what they were saying. I didn’t remember anything about that day other than how awful it felt to be ugly. I wished people would stop looking at me.

I couldn’t wait to get home. I was exhausted from holding it all in. As soon as I stepped through my front door, I sobbed to my mom that I’m ugly, tired of these glasses, I wanted to get contacts, and I meant it. My parents took me back to the eye doctor, and within two weeks, I was wearing contacts. I took them out every night and cleaned them using a plug-in device that looked like a tape recorder. I had a zippered kit for my contact-related effects that I had to take with me to sleepovers. Wearing contacts was high maintenance, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to feel ugly ever again.

I went to school wearing my new contacts, and people looked at me differently. The following week, Brian Grant asked me out. “Sure,” I told him. Dating meant talking on the phone in my kitchen where my parents could hear me but pretended not to. The phone was attached to the wall and had an extra-long curly cord that tangled because I paced while I talked. Untangling it took at least fifteen minutes, holding the switch button down the whole time, so no one got a busy signal when they called. Dating also meant hanging out with Brian in front of my locker between classes. Brian was okay I guess, but the novelty of not being ugly was a relief. Now I didn’t mind when people looked at me.

By the time I was in high school, I had excellent command of my hair. It was the mid 1980s, and I got spiral perms and practiced getting my strands as high as I could with the overuse of Aqua Net. I think I might have had the highest hair in my whole class of over 200 kids. I was on my prom and homecoming courts, and tiaras were carefully placed on top of my hardened hair and didn’t touch my actual head. I still played tennis and I was in the newspaper a lot. People didn’t just look now. They turned their heads and stared.

I took dance lessons for eleven years and quit right before my senior year. The timing was intentional because seniors were required to perform a solo at the annual recital. Most kids were excited about this, but not me. I didn’t want to wear a silly costume and overdone makeup, and I didn’t want people looking at my athletic body. My thighs were thick and muscular, my bottom was filled out, and my right forearm was larger than my upper arm, like Popeye. At dance class, there were a lot of slender girls with skinny legs and small bottoms. We wore unforgiving tights and leotards that forced me to look at my body more discriminately in the mirrored walls surrounding the studio. I was proud of my strong body on the tennis court, but I didn’t like what I saw in that context. What a relief I didn’t have to look in those horrible mirrors anymore.

I got a college scholarship for tennis, and I was featured in the college calendar and paper. People saw me and knew who I was. In my senior year, I was a lead singer in a rock band and dropped the ten pounds I gained in my freshman year, and ten more for good measure. It was the early 1990s as grunge held its angry grip on capitalism, and we responded by wearing brown lipstick and Doc Martens and straightened our hair flat against our heads. And the heads turned once again.

This head turning persisted throughout my 20s and 30s. I admit, it was nice to be positively observed, and I knew that it probably opened different opportunities for me. But after 45 years of people looking at me, I noticed something change over the summer. Heads stopped turning. People stopped looking. I wasn’t ugly or pretty or anything anymore. I became invisible. It stung a little, but then I thought about how I felt in the 7th grade, and it hurt less.

***

Now, at 51, my kids tell me I’m pretty for my age. Typical, but I get it. My husband tells me he’s attracted to me, but this is from a guy without options. He says, “Julie, you’re in your 50s, what do you expect? You look great for your age.” There it is again. Honestly, though, “for your age” doesn’t bother me. What bothers me more is that it’s only going to get worse.

I remind myself that the silent deterioration of my physical self is the normal aging process, and maybe it’s best to focus inward while no one else is looking. As I hold a magnifying glass up to my life, I realize I have not listened to myself nearly enough in the last decade. So, I finally shut up and lean in, and my heart tells me I should shut up some more and write. And a curious thing happens when I do. My writing voice makes me feel seen again, but in a different way. I’m still invisible to the outside world, but I see myself clearer than ever before. And I like what I see, even if it’s only with one eye.