Where I am at in my Braille studies

I have severe convergence insufficiency (CI), meaning that my eyes do not go inward (converge) like they are supposed to whenever I read or do any other tasks that require close-vision effort, and my eyes are unable to sustain this conversion for very long at all when they do manage to converge. This causes me all sorts of grief such as double vision, blurred vision, headaches, eye pain, eye fatigue, and vertigo. I am a client of the local Department of Services for the Blind and am also a student of a correspondence school for the blind because of this, and have about two more months left of vision therapy to try to correct this condition. I am not blind in the typical sense of the word, but I call my convergence insufficiency a form of "functional blindness," in that I function in some ways as a visually impaired person. After my CI is well corrected, I plan to continue with my Braille studies.

It is quite possible to have 20/20 eyesight and still have severe CI, as is my case. It's not that I can't see, it's that my brain won't let me eyes use my vision. My eyes are fine except for astigmatism and farsightedness. The problem with my CI is my brain. This is why I call this "functional blindness." Vision therapy uses sets of increasingly complex and increasingly difficult exercises in order to re-train this brain-eyes connection. I started on June 1 of this year. I'm slowly plugging away at it, and the improvements thus far have been dramatic. Most people have never heard of and don't understand CI, including most medical doctors, and so I have endured a lot of mistreatment and discrimination for having it, and those who are blind or visually impaired often say that I am "not blind enough," making it so that I do not really fit in with either the fully sighted or the blind.