A Stigma 'Tis Him

How an astigmatist might see
a Snellen eye chart

In the past day lots of friends asked for the address to this blog.

Thanks for that, friends.

If any post provokes insight, we hope that you'll leave a comment. This is a dialogue.

My vision can obscure knowing who people are. On the street the other day someone said hi to me and I stopped and talked to her for a minute and then said goodbye. I have no idea who she was. Maybe you? Let me know.

And just now a Facebook friend requested the link to this blog. I looked at their profile. "Who the heck is Mike Miles?" The guy in the picture looked vaguely familiar—Someone I met in passing? Who's the woman next to him—Oh! It's my friend Mika. But her boyfriend's name isn't Mike…

Duh. My brain changed Mika's «a» into an «e» because this brain plays the odds that a name starting with "Mik" is going to be "Mike" not "Mika". And then, assuming Mike is male, brain tells eyes to look at the taller person with the most facial hair in the photo, essentially invisibilizing the woman right next to him—you know, the one that I spent six hours a day with last summer? That one.

How my brain blurred out Mika
and invented "Mike"

Many things can factor into astigmatism, a visual condition where a person can look at two equidistant objects and one seems sharper, the other blurrier. It's what optometrists are testing when they ask you to read a bunch of equally sized letters on an eye chart. Faulty cone cells in my retina contribute to my astigmatism—parts of my eye see better than others, so the start of a word might come clear while the end of it blurs, and I may discern one friend's face but not another's even when they're both a few feet away. 

But there's also a component of astigmatism that's taught and learned, like seeing the word "Mike" instead of "Mika." It isn't pure optics, but also experience that leads to bias and a visual preference for the brain chooses to see. Besides favoring "Mike" over "Mika" in print, my brain might have taken visual information from the photo and favored taller over shorter, male over female, and a plethora of other variables based on my own experience growing up and living in this world.

Cultural astigmatism test: What parts
of this sign attract your attention?

In that sense, astigmatism is as much a social construct as it is an optical one. When I walk down a street in Chinatown or West Bengal, it's the Latin characters that pop into my eyes and brain over the Mandarin glyphs or Devanagari script because I grew up speaking English, not Chinese or Bengali.

My own street has many businesses that don't register with me visually because they aren't places that offer things to someone of my gendered and cultural profile. There are African hair braiding and nail salons within a block or two of my home, but because I've got European hair and keep my nails short and plain, I can't tell you how many of these businesses there are or even what streets they're between, even though I might go into shorefronts right next door to them every day.

I'm curious as an astigmatist: Do people with "normal" vision have cultural astigmatism? When you look at this warning sign from India, which scripts and symbols draw your gaze and which do you tune out? Are you more aware of some places and people and things in your environment than you are of others? And how do you see or not see them? Share your thoughts in the comment section below