![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI don't like small children. They make me twitchy. I don't want any of my own, and I can barely pretend a civil interest in other people's. (Things get better when they're old enough to talk books with me.)
I have ocular albinism. No, I don't have pink eyes. But I also don't have any pigment in the backs of my retinas. Extreme photosensitivity. The yellow face, it burns us. There are also a host of other associated problems, like nystagmus and myopia and generally crappy vision.
I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22. However, this is what I get for being raised in the greenest state in the Land of the Free. Mostly, ocular albinism gets diagnosed when children are still quite small. Which means that the best ophthalmologist to deal with my eyes is the pediatric ophthalmologist in the University's Ophthalmology Dept. Which further means that I have to share a waiting room with small children and Disney movies.
The Disney movies are bad enough. Either they're the new ones, which are crap, or they're the old ones, and destroy my happy childhood memories by being (a.) also crap and (b.) relentlessly misogynistic and phallocentric. (It was The Jungle Book today, which was the first movie I ever saw, at the age of 5. At least I can still love Bagheera and Shere Khan. Last year it was Sleeping Beauty, and I was forced to sit through the bit where Briar Rose meets Prince Whatsisface. Gaah.)
But then there's the small children factor, and the simple truth that a doctor's waiting room is never going to be where you see kids at their best. It just isn't, and I don't blame them for yelling, crying, whining, sassing their parents or any of the other less than charming behaviors I've seen demonstrated in that waiting room. I pitched many a fit of my own when I was that age. But I'm twitchy anyway, because I don't like small children; I'm twitchier became I don't like loud, sudden noises; and I feel like a complete outer space alien freak because I'm the only adult there without small child attached.
It's my penance. I don't know what my sin is, but I know penance when I see it.
I have ocular albinism. No, I don't have pink eyes. But I also don't have any pigment in the backs of my retinas. Extreme photosensitivity. The yellow face, it burns us. There are also a host of other associated problems, like nystagmus and myopia and generally crappy vision.
I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22. However, this is what I get for being raised in the greenest state in the Land of the Free. Mostly, ocular albinism gets diagnosed when children are still quite small. Which means that the best ophthalmologist to deal with my eyes is the pediatric ophthalmologist in the University's Ophthalmology Dept. Which further means that I have to share a waiting room with small children and Disney movies.
The Disney movies are bad enough. Either they're the new ones, which are crap, or they're the old ones, and destroy my happy childhood memories by being (a.) also crap and (b.) relentlessly misogynistic and phallocentric. (It was The Jungle Book today, which was the first movie I ever saw, at the age of 5. At least I can still love Bagheera and Shere Khan. Last year it was Sleeping Beauty, and I was forced to sit through the bit where Briar Rose meets Prince Whatsisface. Gaah.)
But then there's the small children factor, and the simple truth that a doctor's waiting room is never going to be where you see kids at their best. It just isn't, and I don't blame them for yelling, crying, whining, sassing their parents or any of the other less than charming behaviors I've seen demonstrated in that waiting room. I pitched many a fit of my own when I was that age. But I'm twitchy anyway, because I don't like small children; I'm twitchier became I don't like loud, sudden noises; and I feel like a complete outer space alien freak because I'm the only adult there without small child attached.
It's my penance. I don't know what my sin is, but I know penance when I see it.
