When I run photos of myself through my accessible photo description app, more often than not, it says that my eyes are looking upward and to the side. The app classifies this position as me being distracted or thoughtful.
Truth is, my eyes drift and dance and dawdle and dive, and unless my brain commands them to do something specific, they drift upward and to the side.
I think this started when the peripheral vision that lingered the longest was in the part of my right eye that was nearest my nose, so I turned my eye to center that residual site. As time went on and my vision disappeared, my eye control diminished.
One eye doctor performed surgery on my wandering right eye, tightening the muscles to pull the eyeball back. It lasted for less time than it took me to write this post, or so it seemed.
One child in a classroom I observed, too young to know differently, asked why I had zombie eyes.
I wore tinted glasses for a few years around the Teacher of the Year time, partly to shelter me from the brightness of Spotlights and partly, to be honest, to hide my wandering eyes.
I don't hide them now. I don't think of them very often. Maybe I don't care as much? Maybe lots of other things seem much more important? I don't realize how drifty they can be, until suddenly I do and I'm the only one in a group photo who looks distracted or thoughtful.
There's no huge Lesson here, no take away to change the world. It's just me, being curly-haired and tall and passionate and perpetually distracted or thoughtful. I might invest some imagination to create a story about what it is that my sightless eyes are looking at when they drift upward and to the side, just to have a spiffy answer if and when people wonder about it. I might not, though, because just like the calluses on my hands from making jewelry and the scar on my knee from a fall, these eyes are mine, part of me, my own story, and definitely NOT what I use to see this world so vividly.
I'm glad these eyes of mine drift upward rather than downward: it seems a whole lot more hopeful. And, if I speak symbolically for a moment, we are all looking at the world differently anyway, through the lens of our experience and our beliefs, so maybe I am the cool one who actually models that truth. Plus, it isn't a terrible thing to be distracted or thoughtful, or just a little different, or focused on something that can't be seen by the human eye.
Kathy Nimmer, Oct. 2025
