Eye Issue

I sent my book Prayer, Faith, and 12 Kids off to my final editor today. One thing I learned while writing this book was not to fear editorial critique. This fear stemmed from a childhood filled with low grades from reading, grammar, and spelling issues. The real problem, however, was an eye issue.

Critiqued Unjustly

I used to fall into an emotional puddle when someone said my work wasn’t perfect. After all, I worked hard to accomplish any schoolwork I attempted! When I opened a book and read two to three paragraphs, I then observed the page full of words blur into a grey cloud. Then I concentrated hard and pulled that cloud back into readable text. I read in cycles of blur and retrieve. I did not learn to observe proper grammar and spelling as I read because reading was too much work of its own. My writing assignments were like alphabet soup dumped onto a page.

Education Despite Eye Issue

I did not let my scholastic problems hinder me from pursuing more education, however. I accomplished an associate degree immediately after high school. Then I got married and had a baby. While managing a household, I accomplished another associate degree. Then I continued to have children and home school them. When they gave me alphabet soup, I gave an editorial critique that included verbal questioning until I could see his or her message and let the child know it was valuable. In my forties, I learned that my eyes had weak muscles on the inside edges and forty percent of children in school have this to some degree. This was what caused the words on the page to blur when I read.

Eye Issue Resolution

My children also had this eye issue. We did eye pumping exercises together for a couple of weeks, and it fixed our issue. Each of us held a pencil about eighteen inches from the front of our faces and watched the eraser carefully as we brought the pencil in toward the bridge of our noses. We repeated this exercise seven times twice a day. Sometimes we had to stop before that limit in the first few days because it made our eyes very sore.

Smooth Reading and Authoring

I completed a bachelor’s degree in May of 2019 without the difficulty of textbook pages blurring before my eyes. The arduous paper writing and editorial critique process for this degree combined with the writing of Prayer, Faith, and 12 Kids helped me conquer my issues with reading, grammar, and spelling. Now I wonder if writing can always be adjusted and improved in some way.