Gaining depth perception | nicole@web

When I was a kid, I was always the one who was bad at ball sports. Not for lack of trying, either. I'd run after a ball to catch it, only to be off by a few feet. I'd whiff when hitting a softball pitch. And I quit indoor soccer after taking a third ball to the face, because I didn't realize it was coming straight for me. Even with running, I'd trip, and I my bike into mailboxes more times than I care to remember. I'm deeply sorry to the neighbors whose mailboxes I knocked over; I wasn't a vandal, I just couldn't see how close I was to them.

All my life, I thought it was because I was clumsy or just bad at sports. I leaned into endurance athletics, because I knew that I could run and ride a bike, and those didn't require as much hand-eye coordination, which I was crucially lacking.

In 2017, we moved to a small Pennsylvania college town, and I went through the usual pain of finding a new eye doctor. We picked the closest one who was accepting new patients, because it was convenient. It was a fortuitous choice. My wife and I got appointments at the same time and went in together. She went first and had a perfectly normal eye exam. Then he started on me.

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