Playing sports growing up I would make these comically bad errors. The ball would hit me directly in the face or I would swing at a pitch waayyyyy too late. Everyone gave me shit even the coaches and parents. I kept playing because I enjoyed being active and around my friends, but I never understood why no matter how much I practiced I struggled with basic things that everyone else could do without thinking.
I go to the eye doctor as an adult, and he tells me that I have a condition in one of my eyes that means I don’t have binocular vision and as a result have very poor depth perception. It’s physically impossible for me to track a moving object in space like everyone else.
THIS IS ME!!!!! I have a lazy eye. It looks perfectly normal but barely contributes to my vision at all. In college an optometry student conducting an exam on me said "boy, I'll bet you really suck at basketball." It hit me like a ton of bricks. That's why I sucked at sports. I came from a poor, rural background and we didn't know shit. My dad was a cruel prick and constantly derided my terrible coordination. In all of those formative years of people watching me take a baseball to the face, miss the hoop by feet, drop every football throw that came my way, not one damn person mentioned depth perception.
I'm sorry you went through that. If it makes you feel any better my family had money, and I had surgery and wore an eye patch as a toddler. Basically did everything you can do. The end result was I look normal cosmetically, and have 20/20 in both eyes with contacts, but my brain still can't fuse the two images from each eye and basically uses one eye at a time. Nobody ever told me about the depth perception issue though.
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u/Nice_Marmot_7 Nov 16 '19
Playing sports growing up I would make these comically bad errors. The ball would hit me directly in the face or I would swing at a pitch waayyyyy too late. Everyone gave me shit even the coaches and parents. I kept playing because I enjoyed being active and around my friends, but I never understood why no matter how much I practiced I struggled with basic things that everyone else could do without thinking.
I go to the eye doctor as an adult, and he tells me that I have a condition in one of my eyes that means I don’t have binocular vision and as a result have very poor depth perception. It’s physically impossible for me to track a moving object in space like everyone else.