“Honey, it’s right there!” - that was what my Mom often told me when I was a little kid.

Whenever she asked me to bring her something, we were often confused about its
position. From her perspective, the item was on the left of my face, but for me, my left
side was non-existent; all I saw was everything from my right eye. Through the hard way,
I realized I was different from others.

In my childhood, I went through an operation that cut off my left eye to prevent me from
losing the remaining one. Since then, I have become a one-eyed person. I believed that I
was different; my experience was difficult both physically and emotionally. My mind
played great tricks as my eye perceived things with no depth perception, causing my
numerous injuries of bumping into tables, chairs, and doors. I also dropped things as I
could not identify the correct positions of objects in a 3D dimension. While everyone was
screaming and terrified by a 3D movie, I sat quietly and wondered why everyone was
acting like that. To me, the 3D movie was just a small picture with no depth. Growing up
as a visually impaired child, there was a time that I did not have much confidence. I felt
uncomfortable whenever my relatives asked me about my eye’s condition; I got nervous
when doing something in the crowd; and most importantly, I had to live with a constant
fear of completely losing my vision. The emotional stress held me back from enjoying
my life.

One night, I came home after class. I grabbed some clothes and went to the bathroom. I
had a habit of brushing my teeth while taking a shower, but on that night, I was brushing
my teeth in front of the mirror of my sink. I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time.
I saw a normal boy with an artificial eye. He looked the same as every person I had
encountered, with no difference, unless I tried to scan every detail in his face. At the
moment, I realized that I was unconfident because I had believed that I was different
from others, but actually almost no one recognized that I was visually impaired. After
that night, I asked some of my best friends whether they had noticed something strange
about my eyes. The result was that none of them knew that I had only one eye until I told
them. I felt ecstatic to conclude: “if no one notices my ailment, why should I bother and
let it take me down?”

Many years after the momentous day, my eye’s condition still stays the same but I have
changed a lot to break through my limitation. How I experience the world is different
from others, but the reality is what I make it. I have become more open to enjoy going out
with friends, even doing some most extreme things that not many people dare to try. Now
people ask me about my eye, I can openly share my story with them. Being a disabled
person also has a positive side because it encourages me to experience more to make up
for my ailment. By enriching life experience, my eye widens its view about the world – it
is able to look at everything in many different angles that a normal eye may not see. It
shapes me as a person, and I want that “eye” separates me from other people, not by my
physical eye.

We all have to start somewhere; whether our dreams are far away or within reach, we
will never get there until we move. I believe that we are only limited by the belief we
play in our minds. There might be times when there are obstacles for a one-eyed person,
but they only make me more resilient with my goals.