Quartz
A Decade Gone
I’ve lost a decade. It’s not missing, or anything, but there are ten whole years in my life where I feel very little connection to it. A decade gone.
It took me a long time to understand what happened. It has a name, now, and it did then too, but I could not learn it for it was not taught. It existed, as much it does now, sprinkled all over the Internet in ways that could have possibly struck my eyes in a way that may have, at some point, granted me clarity. Dysphoria. A word, that explains how I felt, what I felt; when I felt. I can sometimes restrain my jealousy down to “a little” when I think of others who don’t have to live life with that feeling. It reminds me a lot of another time in my life:
The trouble with being a kid, and even really an adult most times, is that you just don’t know what bad is. Not ‘bad’ in a moral sense but ‘bad’ as in, this is a situation which can be fixed. Even fixed easily, sometimes. It’s broken in some way that you don’t recognize, because it’s always been this way or you never noticed that it was slowly getting worse.
Eyesight is one of those things that, at least for me, wasn’t a thing I thought you could think about. Some people wore these things on their face; they sold them in the store as “Reading Glasses”, and that was just one of those things some adults needed. But then I had an eye exam, and lo, it turns out that things were bad; I just didn’t know it. It’s a stereotypical thing but there really was this sense of wonder, even at 13, of seeing leaves on trees. To take the easy pun, my eyes were opened. It wouldn’t have happened if my parents didn’t know this was a possibility, or if they couldn’t afford it, or if they didn’t want to admit it was possible.
For a while seeing in sharpness and clarity was a treasure itself, but slowly the novelty faded and the real troubles of having to wear glasses seeped into my life. I had to do P.E. class with these things on my face, or maybe leave them in the locker? It depended on the sport that day. I had to clean them constantly.
And so it is with dysphoria; I didn’t know about how bad everything was until I was able to consider that it was fixable. These feelings separated by time and intensity wern’t good, per se, but they were also normal. I just had no context for which to place the symptoms I felt. For ten years at least. A decade. Gone to me.