When I posted my eighth-grade school photo on TikTok and Instagram a few weeks ago, I expected to get some laughs out of my family and friends – and maybe even a couple of strangers. I didn’t expect the photo to be shared hundreds of thousands of times or be seen by over 20 million people.
The photo features me in 1989, smiling hopefully at the camera with a curtain of long brown hair covering about a third of my face. I’d practiced the look for weeks in my bedroom mirror with the goal of using my hair to cover my lazy eye in my annual school photo.
I felt like my lazy eye, known medically as amblyopia, completely defined who I was. I thought that if I could hide it just once, maybe people would see me and think of me as something more than just my eye.
When the prints came back a few weeks later, I was devastated. Not only had I failed to cover the eye with my hair, I had covered just enough of it to make it obvious that I was trying to hide it. A portion of the iris peeked out defiantly from behind the drape of hair like it was photobombing my own photo. The boys who bullied me daily saw the photo and flailed about at their desks in fits of laughter.
I ...
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