Hey there!

Monday, July 15th was the one-year anniversary of my eye injury — so I’ve been dealing with a whole lot of feelings this week.

Many of them have been light and joyous, as I reflect on my amazing community and how incredibly lucky I am.

But also... it's been a year, y'all.

Celebrating my "pirate birthday" (as my husband has been calling it) has got me thinking a lot about perspective and point of view. By complete coincidence, my ocularist Christina King (the artist who makes my prosthetics) chose this week for her one-eyed meetup as part of a fundraiser for the Fun Eye Fund (a nonprofit that helps folks gain more self confidence with fun prosthetics).

It was a total blast — and being inducted into a loving community that none of us chose to join was a lovely (and illuminating) way to mark my anniversary.

Some had lost an eye to cancer or retinal detachment. Some had lost an eye in a car accident. At least three of us had lost our eyes to gun violence. And talking with all these delightful people gave me an incredible lesson in perspective.

A few days ago, I did a meditation with Jeff Warren on the Calm app about how everything you experience — sights, sounds, smells — is part of the "bubble of you." Instead of just seeing ourselves as minds and emotions contained within a physical body, he asked us to expand our sense of self to include everything we could see, hear, touch.

As a writer, I thought this was such a cool exercise.

After all, everything we encounter in the world is filtered through our experience to become uniquely "us."

You and I could sit and watch the same movie and have completely different takeaways. We could hear the same bird and have completely different reactions. Because, in a way, we're watching completely different movies, and hearing completely different birds.

We're both experiencing a completely unique bubble of the world.

I think about this a lot as a writer who writes books from multiple points of view, and has to describe events from the perspectives of different characters.

A good example of this is Toshiyo's lair on the fourth floor of the Cobalt Tower in the Bulari Saga. The first time Jaantzen enters it in Double Edged, he describes it as cluttered and chaotic and unsettling. The first time Starla enters it, though, she describes it as a place that makes her feel creative and full of possibility. The space hasn't changed; it's just being experienced by two different characters.

Spending time with dozens of people who have also lost an eye this week really drove home this idea of perspective. Not only do we each have a different emotional perspective on our shared situation, we literally have different visual perspectives.

I’ve always had terrible vision, but it’s correctable with contacts to 20/20 — so my blind eye doesn't slow me down much now that I'm used to it. One of my new friends has extremely low vision even with her glasses, even before she lost one of her eyes to retinal detachment. You wouldn't know it by talking to her, but when it comes to things like reading the menu in a restaurant, she’s functionally blind.

Another new friend still has some vision in his bad eye (as do I), but whereas I just have an annoying blotch of light that I prefer to block out with an eye patch or prosthetic, his bad eye creates a blurry double-vision image at a tilted angle. He has to cover it with an eye patch in order to function.

But it's the emotional perspective that struck me the most. Nearly everyone I talked to thought they had it easy compared to other other people in the group.

A friend who’d lost her eye at 18 months told me it must be worse for adults who lose an eye, because kids are more adaptable.

(While I've adjusted pretty quickly, I think, and to me it sounds awful growing up with mean kids making fun of you.)

A friend who'd been told her entire life she would probably lose vision in one or both eyes told me it must be worse to lose an eye suddenly, without any warning.

(While I appreciated that I didn’t have to spend years worrying about this before it happened!)

Several friends who lost their eye to cancer told me it must be so much more terrible to lose it in a traumatic event.

(While I'm extremely grateful I just had to go through a couple surgeries instead of months or years of chemotherapy and treatments.)

It's all about your perspective.

Forgive the heavier email than usual, but as a writer, I have appreciated this intimate reminder of how perspective works. I hope you find it interesting, too.

But most of all, I hope that as you go about your day — whether you’re sitting silently next to a stranger on the bus or chatting with loved ones over dinner — you keep in mind that each of us comes with our own perspective.

To see the world through someone else's eyes (or eye) even for a moment is to enrich our own perspectives.

We can do that by reading books about people who aren't like us. We can do that by having conversations with friends and strangers. We can do that by being curious about the lives of others instead of dismissive or defensive.

What a gift it is to build our muscle of empathy.

What a gift.

To each of you who've ever responded to one of my emails with your own story, thank you so much for giving me a glimpse into your own perspective. I appreciate it more than you could ever know.

Take care out there,

Jessie

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