It's an adventure

Here is the most important thing about my eyes: they are brown.

Yesterday, our movement teacher held one on one conversations with each of us, pretty much just to check in and ask us questions about how we feel her class is going. One of the questions she asked me was if I "liked my body." The little voice inside my head started to scoff, daring me to be just a little whinier, but I answered truthfully anyway.

"I... Appreciate what it's trying to do," I said, and my teacher laughed. "It sort of works against me sometimes, but we're figuring it out."

My teacher raised an eyebrow.

"What do you mean?"

I cringed. I usually tried to avoid this conversation at all costs. (I am forcing my fingers to put it out on the interwebs)

"Well, I have this retinal pathology?" The sentence came out of me as a question. "So I have blind spots that make it sort of hard to see. And, you know, dealing with the medications for it and how that changes everything..."

"Why didn't you tell me??"

I don't know what reaction I was expecting, but it wasn't that one.

Here's the thing. I spend 98% of every day telling inner-Kaila not to be so over dramatic. My eyes are a little messed up, but there are still two of them, and they still work, mostly. There are people who have it so much worse. So yeah, it was weird to have a teacher give immediate significance to something I try to belittle.

"Do the people in your group know?" She asked me.

"No," I shrugged. "I know how to deal with it, and I don't want it to change anything."

"So when I have all fifteen of you running through the space?"

"Yeah that's terrifying."

(I guess I should take a second to sort of back all of this up. So when I was twelve, I noticed that when I put my fist in a certain spot, it disappeared. Cool trick, right? We've all got blind spots. Then my first turned into my hand, spread out full. That's when I figured it was time to tell my parents.

There were a lot of different eye doctors on the windy road to Anita Agarwol, who just happens to be the leading doctor in the search for answers concerning the pathology with a big name that pretty much just means "white dot" or "blind spot" syndrome.

Eventually I became friends with all of the different nurses. All of the technicians knew me, and Anita Agarwol and I exchanged pictures of our dogs.

We spent seven hours at a time taking pictures, looking at the pictures, putting in eye drops, injecting dyes into my arm veins, and wearing contacts with wires in them. Party time!

Unfortunately, the blind spots grew, and my left one is bigger than the right, but as of now they're stable.)

"Then what must it like," you're all asking, "to have moved to one of the fastest moving cities in the world?"

It's an adventure.

Sometimes I bump into people that I just didn't see coming. Voices come from seemingly nowhere and sometimes I trip on trashcans that I just didn't see. Curbs are the worst and stairs are mean, but it's so completely doable. Also, the lights never go out, so the dark isn't a problem. I don't have to deal with driving in parking lots, so it's pretty much a breeze.

Last night at crew, my nightmare came true. I'm running sound for this play, which consisted of listening for "sound standby" and then "sound go", until it was discovered that the stage manager could be heard every time he opened his mouth. Then it became a series of hand signals. In the dark. Yeah. I don't think he understands how hit or miss this system is.

"It's good that I know this," my teacher said, putting away her chair. "I was going to tell you that you seem hesitant, but you obviously have a really good reason."

Now these blind spots aren't all bad. In an audition where the director is making me nervous? Sing my sixteen bars to the wall five and a half feet to his right. Poof! He's disappeared.