I couldn’t stop stabbing myself in the eye. No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop stabbing myself in the eyes. I bought a mirror to use in my office. I propped it up on a jar on my desk. But every time, I stabbed my eye. I twisted and contorted my arm and hand trying to position myself just right, but the left one too would be stabbed.
Eight days out from LASIK, my now perfect sighted eyes were being mauled by the more-than-hourly event of administering the numerous eye drops required during recovery. If I wasn’t stabbing myself in the eye, I was pouring the liquid down my face. Co-workers were starting to worry that my emotional state was less stable than normal.
Exasperated after every attempt I would hiss at myself. WTF?!? How can this be so hard???
Then one day it happened. Sitting on a conference call and trying to stay focused on the call at hand and not get distracted by my e-mail inbox or all the tasks on my to-do list I absentmindedly looked at the mirror on my desk and readied the tiny vial of preservative-free saline. Perfect hits! Both eyes! Thinking it was a fluke I dropped more into each eye. It wasn’t a fluke! For the first time in a thousand attempts I had hit my mark without incident.
I lost all focus on the phone call.
I couldn’t figure out what I had done. I hadn’t done anything differently. Wait. Yes, I had. I hadn’t had to bend my arm in half to put the drops into the eye opposite my dominant hand. But why? How had I mastered this task? And with so little effort! I looked around for answers.
That’s when I saw it.
The mirror. Across from me on the desk. Across the desk.
For all but six years of my life I have been so nearsighted I can’t see anything that’s not four inches from my eyes without corrective lenses. For basically my entire life any time I have had to do anything with my eyes – instill eye drops, put on mascara, get an eyelash off my eyeball – I’ve had to do it with my nose nearly touching the mirror. It never occurred to me to do anything but move the mirror in close so I could “see” what I was doing. Remove glasses, smush your face on the mirror. It was the only way to see.
The only way, that is, until my 20/20 vision was surgically restored. With the mirror across the desk from me, I could still see my eyes perfectly. Without being crammed into the mirror, I could maneuver the vial easily. Drop. Drop. Blink. Viola!
So often we continue doing what’s “normal”. What we’ve always done and how we’ve always done it. Even if it doesn’t “work” we try it even more. The more I failed at putting in my eye drops, the closer I moved in to the mirror. Because that had worked in the past, but it wasn’t working now. But I kept doing it. Closer. Closer. Closer…
It wasn’t until I took a step back and did something completely abnormal that I found my solution. And my saline solution.