I didn’t really think much about my eyes or vision during my junior high and high school years. There were times where I felt like I couldn’t see very well and I would occasionally get a picture back where my eyes weren’t aligned, but I didn’t think much about it.
I remember in 8th grade working on a project in English with a boy. He looked at me and said, what is wrong with your eyes. I was so surprised and responded, “how did you know I had eye problems? I had surgeries and glasses and patching as a little kid, but they are better now.” He responded, “okay, but one is looking over there.” I was now very confused and I just said “oh, okay” and that was the end of the conversation.
I felt a little bad and didn’t understand because I didn’t think that my vision problems were visible to others. I remember asking my mom and she said that it wasn’t at all noticeable so I just didn’t worry about it, but that isolated experience always left a big question mark for me.
I’m sharing lots of pictures so that you can see the eye turn and how it changed over the years. There is a consistent, slight exotropia (outward turn), but sometimes it goes way out there as you can see in some of the pictures. Also, I am not terribly photogenic, so we can all good a good laugh from these lovely school pictures.
7th Grade 
8th Grade
I started taking piano lessons and AP classes and noticed some difficulties with comprehension and music reading. I didn’t even bother trying to become a good sight reader for piano. I just memorized every piano piece. My teachers would be shocked that I wanted to memorize my recital pieces because most kids hated memorizing. That was the only way that I could play well. Sight reading is still a huge struggle for me.
AP European History about killed me. The endless reading assignments were so confusing and even though I was a straight-A student, it felt impossible. When my Honors English classes would read difficult books I had to use spark notes to help me. I would read the spark notes version of the chapter, then the chapter, otherwise I couldn’t follow what was going on. I thought that this was normal and that everyone found it difficult. I talked to my English teacher about this and she was worried I was using spark notes to cheat, “I am not a cheater, if I were, I wouldn’t have asked” was my reply and she trusted me and gave me the okay.
10th Grade 
11th Grade
I must have expressed some of these frustrations to my parents because they found a new eye doctor to take me to in California. I don’t remember much about the appointment and we can’t find any medical records of it, but I am 99% sure that it was some sort of vision therapy clinic and I was about 15 or 16 years old.
What I do remember is that there were really young kids there and I felt like I was too old to be there. I remember doing a test where I wore special goggles and read a passage. The goggles tracked my eye movements. Then I answered questions about the passage. I remember missing the majority of the questions and being amazed as I watched the playback of what my eyes did while I read. They jumped all over the place, constantly going back, rereading whole lines and phrases multiple times.
I remember him explaining that I was reading at a 6th-grade reading level (I was in 10th grade). I remember thinking, oh, that explains why reading is so hard. He didn’t talk much about vision and kept talking about my disability and how I struggled in school and how hard it must be and how they could help me get smarter.
I remember leaving and talking about how he thought I was dumb and thinking that was funny because I was one of the smartest students in my class of over 600. My mom didn’t think it was funny and was worried he was going to take her confident, smart teenage daughter and give her a complex about her eyes. We both weren’t impressed and I never went back for the weekly visits they recommended.
The irony is
I didn’t go to any more eye doctors in my teenage years. My eye would wander out when. I was tired, but for the most
I remember getting my prom pictures back and being horrified because my eye was lazy in every single one. I remember being a little paranoid that people would see them and notice my lazy eye. Little did I know that my lipstick-braces combination was going to attract way more attention than the lazy eye.
After high school, I headed to Brigham Young University for college and absolutely loved it there! The reading and difficulty of college brought up the same old vision concerns and I went to an optometrist. I was told to start patching my good eye to strengthen my bad eye. I think I patched for a total of about 22 minutes before I decided I’d rather die than
While at BYU, I met my future husband Zac and my eye went to the backburner. He didn’t care or ever even say anything about it and I was too deep in love to even give my eyes a second thought. I remember one night having a deep conversation about life and I told him my big secret, that I had strabismus, “Maybe you’ve seen my eye go out when I’m tired.” It makes me laugh now, thinking that having a lazy eye was my little
After I graduated from college, I didn’t need my eyes as much and I didn’t really notice any problems for several years. My eye did start wandering more, especially during my pregnancies. When I go through pictures it seems like most of the time my eyes were straight in high school and college, but over the last 10-15 years, more and more pictures have the lazy eye.
I am not much of a selfie taker and had adorable little babies to take pictures of so I wasn’t too focused on my lazy eye, it was never a big deal and I rarely even noticed it. Read about why I started worrying about it here.