#like. normal brains don't function like this do they

[magpies-gold]

I have both eyes and they're both technically functional but I still relate to a lot of this because I also have monocular vision. In my case, the problem is with my brain, actually. It can only process images from one eye at a time because of a defect when I was born that required surgical intervention. Even after the fix, my brain just never learned that I still had two eyes, so it has no capacity to combine the image data like normal people do. As a result, I have no depth perception and I have a dominant eye that I use 90% of the time.

I also have visual snow that's especially noticeable when I close my eyes and at night in the dark, but as there isn't a lot of research on visual snow, I'm not sure if that's related or coincidental. In case people want to know a bit more about life as a person with monocular vision in a two-eyeballs kind of situation: I have a weird trick that I can do that seems to astound folks with binocular vision: I can consciously switch eyes. It's like flexing a muscle and I can decide to use the left one or the right in the same way that I can choose to wave my left or right hand. Trying to use both at the same time just doesn't work, though. If I really try, there's just this pressure feeling in my head, like I'm trying to imagine a colour that doesn't exist, but I can't make the two work together at all. This is likely just a me thing but my non-dominant eye is much worse than my dominant eye, and its been getting worse over the course of my life. It's still useful, but extremely near-sighted, so much so that it alone is legally blind and makes my optometrist and all their staff wince. But I can read very, very tiny close-up writing with it, so it comes in handy when I'm doing things like reading. My dominant eye is a little near sighted but not much. It's pretty stable. Also probably just a me thing: I have one lazy eye, but it relates to the monocular vision. It's my dominant one. If I use the non-dominant eye, you can actually tell when I've switched to it because my dominant eye "switches off" and rolls a little bit up and out. It was worse when I was a kid (my mom saying "Meghan, are you looking at me?" was a common thing) but it still happens nowadays. My non-dominant eye isn't lazy, so when I'm looking around normally with my dominant eye you can't tell that there's anything different about me than your average Joe. It's a mostly invisible disability for me (and I still feel strange calling it a disability because it's just how I've always seen, and yet here I am making a list of complexities regarding my vision, so....) A final possibly-just-me thing is that I hold my pencil like a space alien and always have. The reasoning I've given since I was a kid was because of which eye I use, I wouldn't be able to see what the end of my pencil was doing if I were holding it "correctly", so I draw and write like this:

(Video here, if you want to see the rest of that: https://www.tumblr.com/magpies-gold/699322866172346368?source=share) Can confirm from the above that head-tilt is a thing when one has monocular vision, even with two eyes. Because of the head tilt, I also get people startling me on my non-dominant side a lot, possibly because with my "blind" side tilted back and away from what I'm looking at, they think I'll see them sooner since that eye is closer to looking behind me. Therefore they don't think they're sneaking up on me. That is, right up until they appear, as if by magic, in my field of vision and I go AAAA!

Depth perception problems that I personally encounter: I don't drive so I don't have a lot to add there except that trying to learn scared me too much to proceed. I was not comfortable with how much slower my reaction time was on my left side or how I couldn't accurately judge where exactly objects in front of me were, so I gave it up in my teenage years in favour of a good pair of sneakers and a transit pass. But I will loudly say that going down stairs sucks. I am very opinionated on how much I love and appreciate when stairs have the bright yellow stripe at the edge, or some other marker to aim for. If stairs are all one uniform colour I am hesitant as hell putting my feet down because I can't tell how far a drop it is. I'm slow on descents on unfamiliar stairs and I desperately need the railing to hold on to. Going up stairs isn't bad because I have other visual cues to help me, and I'm much faster there. I also don't do well on really uneven terrain, like the rocky shores we have on beaches here. Watching my fiancé go hopping and skipping over rocks like a mountain goat gives me light wistful despair because I know if I tried that I would miscalculate almost immediately and break all my bones. My tactic is to get low and go slow if I have to cross anything where distances get tricky to guesstimate. I become a crab. I also have friends who know to slow down and will also let me hold their hand (bless). I do have peripheral vision ghosts on the non-dominant side even with two eyes. The most common thing I see is ghost cats. I'll see my cat jump up on a counter in my peripheral vision only to turn and find nothing there. Sometimes my brain will also suggest there might be a person walking in my peripheral vision. It's just overcompensating for what it has to fill in the blanks on. I can't catch things that are thrown at me except by sheer luck. Sports like baseball and badminton were brutal in high school and I got into many a verbal confrontation with my teacher while trying to explain that I had a very good reason to be afraid of the projectile coming for my face. I told him more than once to go close one eye and try it for himself and see what it's like. No peeking! I can't peek. Similarly, I can't fly a drone. I learned that very quickly when I accidentally flew Tim's full tilt into a wall. Oops. >> Drone was okay. I, on the other hand, was absolutely boggled by how I just could not tell where it was in space until boom, I'd crashed it. And that's because another thing is that I was personally born the way that I am, so I'm fully acclimated to it. I know nothing else, and I don't notice all the micro calculations that I do to translate my 2D view into 3D space so that I can move around in it. At least, I don't until I have a situation where the object I'm working with suddenly has no context, like a drone in mid-air, and then I suddenly notice my limitations. 3D movies largely don't work for me. They're basically just regular 2D movies involving stupid glasses. -shrug- Finally, video games with a lot of icons around the edges of the screen are a nightmare for me because I can't see all of my monitor at once. Again: slow as balls reaction time because I have to re-calibrate and turn my head a lot. The concept of a wide-screen monitors makes me go "Jesus, why?"

writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.

[vanglaggle]

Infodump about Gladiolus please.. theyre taking over my brain..

OKAYYY SOOO UHHH 🫡

he can't see forward ! he actually has to hunch to where his face is flat to see you. their neck doesn't support this because of fucked up genetics.

he was sort of(?) emotionally neglected as a child because their face and body language don't really convey emotions too well. he can't cry and doesn't ask for help so geno and reaper took a while to get the hang of figuring out his cues.

they really like shiny things and small objects.

he's not very fond of nightmare because of how he treated dust (dust is kinda like a weird uncle to him...... afterdeath + dust trust me i know this) but doesn't really mind people who associate with him.

he's super off putting.... people are usually a little timid around him but he likes making friends

their wings weren't functional until about 13 ! he's 18 as per the timeline

he likes doing things for the bit, he won't pull harmful pranks or anything but if it means lying he probably will. he will stick to a gag for years if he can. geno specifically encourages this

most of the time he likes travelling universes, but usually it takes a lot of energy so he'll stay in there for a bit (usually a few days before he can leave)

NORMAL MPREG BABY 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 MPREG🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (reaper gave birth . it was rough because of his sharp corners)

there's more but like . yeah

[le-velo-pour-dru]

It's so comforting to realize that since the self-imposed rules I put upon myself are completely made up, I can change them to make myself more comfortable. I forget about that all the time X'3

[moghedien]

i swear if you people start uwuifying OCD like you did with ADHD and autism I'm going to start attacking

[greppelheks]

I feel so inadequate today. I'm on this job without training or guidance or experience, and I'm fucking up a lot. And I don't have answers for some questions. And it's not my fault because I was never trained by anyone and I figured most of it out myself, but I hate feeling powerless in anything.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[loversandantiheroes]

It is so goddamn bizarre when you finally get meds that actually kinda work and you realize that your baseline for normality was buried so deep it could've struck oil.

[sherlock-is-ace]

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[watery-melon-baller]

its so fun :)) and awesome :)) that i cannot fucking make my brain focus on my homework :))) holy shit im gonna kill someone :)) why can't my brain just work for five fucking minutes :)) this is easy homework too I just can't concentrate on it at all :)) and it's due tomorrow morning :)))

[indigodawns]

.

[didntaskforfrozenyoghurt]

ironic that after all these years advocating for photosensitivity warnings, i'm only just now realising i have probably had epilepsy that whole time too. doesn't help that my dad didn't know about the existence of focal seizures

[gurorori]

im so so sad i wish i could be an adult

[friendofthecrows]

Wish I had more of that stereotypical "refined genius psychopath mystery villain" vibes and less "dysfunctional no sleep cycle can't tell when/if they have emotions traumatized mess doesn't feel like a human paranoid future true crime psychopath" vibes. So that was word salad. Moving on.

[queerstudiesnatural]

ok well. just went to see a neuropsychologist and all she asked me were the standard questions you find in every internet autism test. which i KNOW don't apply to me ("do you find it difficult to infer people's intentions", "do you find it difficult to read between the lines" etc) and like she was literally reading off of her computer and asking me to pick one of the options between "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree" and it's like girl i could have done that at home. sure hope she's not stopping there and that she's not gonna just look at what i said but at the way i said it. idk it irked me that she just pulled up the old (as in outdated and reductive) standardised test on her computer and acted as if those questions would make me question myself like girl i've done this test fifteen times. not only is it not going to tell you anything about me but it's not going to tell you anything about most people. and most autistics. and she did suggest i come back for a more formal and global assessment, but she also kept using the words "cognitive deficit" to describe autism. which i realise is a commonly used term, but it feels reductive idk. so overall i'm not overjoyed with how this went lol.

[cheesey-rice]

anyway if you miss learning the way you used to learn as a kid you have to just like. Stop filtering sensory perceptions through "thoughts." "just do it" "Lose the ego" "Become one with the flow" etc, what these guys are all describing is just not putting your sensory stimulus between too many complicated thought pathways. Like when you're "not thinking" you're still going to experience things/record them/behave like a person but you're just putting a pause on filtering the sensory patterns you find distinct through your pre-existing probability affecting pathways. Without thinking you already have like automatic mechanisms of pattern recognition, and when learning a new skill like a language or basketball or dancing trying to push your behaviors through pre-existing connections to previous environments will Not Help because like. You don't already know how to do those things bruv. it will be easier to attach your motivational/reward/ corrective mechanisms (the sensation of emotion) to the new stimuli (how your body is moving in response to the new cues you're looking at/paying attention to) if you don't filter your attention through the momentarily excess processing space of pre-existing connections.

[unhinged-nymph]

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