Everyone Feels Sorry For People With No Eyes. But No One Thinks Of The One-Eyeds.

Well, you might since you subscribe to this substack.

When I was born, I had this super rare ailment that meant I was blind in one eye. But only one! Almost everyone who has this ailment has it in both eyes, so in that sense I had a lucky eye.

When I was little, my parents brought me out, and we raised money for the no-eyes, who very unfortunately couldn’t see at all. And I spent my childhood having it drilled into me that “it could be worse”—which was true.

But it was also strange. I felt different. I got teased, I couldn’t play sports as well as the other kids, and somewhere in there I accepted that I wasn’t allowed to feel bad about any of it because the no-eyeds had it worse and so feeling sorry for myself meant I was a monster.

This is somewhat awfully recorded in a People magazine story from 1991 where I regale the reporter with how people are mean to me, but that just means they’re not nice people.

“I don’t like school, because people bother me about my eye,” Ben says, imitating a singsong taunt. ”‘I don’t like you!You don’t have an eye! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!’ So I say, ‘Well, you’re the one that’s being mean, because you don’t know what you’re doing to other people.’”

But years went by, and I developed the personality I have today—uniquely funny, predictably unhappy. Then I became a teenager who wanted to rebel, which for me meant deciding I was maybe the biggest victim in history and I should take pills and get in fights and drive cars off cliffs.

But one day I go to a party, and this guy comes up to me—we live in a town of 10k people so having never met someone around my age is a thing—and he says, “I have been waiting to meet you. We both have one eye.”

And I look at his eyes, which I at the time never did, and I see one of his eyes is not only obviously glass, but it is OBVIOUSLY glass. I had spent a huge amount of my life trying to get a perfect eye that would trick everyone. I’d had genuinely insane surgeries, pins implanted in my skull—which you had to do while awake but on Demerol, and they don’t even do anymore—all so people wouldn’t notice. And this guy I was talking to had a Medium Blue! This was an off-the-rack eye.

And it occurred to me just what a little baby I had been. Not only did I have it better than the no-eyeds—I had it better than a lot of one-eyeds.

I don’t know what happened to him. I’m not going to look. He’s out there somewhere and if he reads this, he’ll understandably be offended. But who gives a shit—he doesn’t even have two eyes.

That moment stuck with me, because it forced me to reflect on my own luck. Doctors had always said—two-eyeds had always said—”you’re lucky to have one eye.” It always felt meaningless. But seeing him made me understand what the actual lucky eye was: it was my glass eye. The nice one. The one too many people can’t afford.

So I have decided to use what little influence I have in the world to start a charity to raise money for one-eyed people to help pay for their prosthetics. It’s called LUCKY EYE.

I have filled out the paperwork, but it takes a minute to get the approval, so I am not asking you for money. I am merely asking you to engage with this post so that I can ask you for money later.