How Should I Talk About What Happened to My Eye?

Trigger/Content Warning: domestic violence, rape.

I am losing vision in my left eye from a juvenile cataract. The process is slow and difficult for me (others have different experiences). I’ve had some exceptional doctors look at it (back when I had the means to do so), and it’s inoperable. To help with my vision issues, I block the vision from my left eye, by wearing a vision blocking lens (one that covers the pupil) to block large amounts of light so it acts the same as an eye patch.

I have synesthesia, and because of the ‘sound’ that a black contact lens makes, I prefer to wear a white lens. It’s not as ‘noisy’ and I like the aesthetic. One day, my eye will be like that naturally. It will be beautiful.

This means, however, that I’m somewhat visibly impaired when people meet me. I prefer it this way. The vision on my right side isn’t that great (it’s excellent for catching movement in the periphery, though), and people could do with a warning that I can’t see on that side in case they care about blindsiding me.

Once I answer any sort of question about my eye, invariably the next comes — how’d that happen?

This is where it gets complicated because it’s not even really a story about me. It’s certainly not a pleasant one. This is where the story gets nasty.

The fight that ended my parent’s marriage permanently was what permanently altered my vision.

They were fighting over the fact that my mom, who was still addicted to heroin, kept running out on my dad for days at a time. They met when she was a sex worker, and she had been returning to that old life to fund quite a drug habit. I’m sure that living with my narcissistic, abusive, pedophilic father was pretty unpleasant and probably took a lot of numbing. On this night he had been drinking moonshine and had enough of hearing anything that wasn’t about him, so he started hitting her.

Three-year-old me ran to the pantry and hid. When they would fight it could last for several hours, so it was always best that I stick to the pantry, that way I could at least get some Cheerios. Sometimes, they’d both just forget about me in there.

I could hear him REALLY beating her worse than usual this time, her screams and howls were more like a trapped animal than anything human, so I tucked myself as hard as I could into the corner of that pantry. I pushed until I was under the shelves and behind some cans, curled into the corner, my view obstructed by pickles and beans.

As if I could hide from it forever.

I could hear her screaming “DON’T TIE ME DOWN TOM,” among his litany of cursing. Every once in a while I’d hear him hit her, meat against meat. He was telling her, over and over, that this was the last time. If she walked out this time, she’d never come back into his life. She started begging him to stop, and then the sounds got worse. Her words shattered into sobs and crying.

I’m not going to go on describing it like this. It’s painful for me and not useful to people who ask, but imagine all of this coming to you in a flash when someone asks about your eye. Once in a while, it comes to me as I put the lens on my eye, too.

For three days, he savaged her. On the third day, she had managed to get herself free. My father taunted her as she left screaming laughter at her, and it was then the door to my haven swung open, my father’s dark figure backlit, burning its shadow into my light-deprived eyes.

He dragged me out by the hair and said “You gonna stay for her?” and then punched me, hard in the eye. Chunks of my hair tore out of my scalp, but I will still suspended there. He continued to punch me, in the head, in the eye. “You going to stay or go?” he screamed, and then I can’t recall details until I became aware I was on the ground. My cheek was resting on broken glass, and the edge felt cool and comforting on my hot face.

It had been three days since anyone in the family had heard from us, so I was found there laying there in the broken glass when some cousins dropped in to check on us.

Years later, my father would show me the stitches from my head that he kept in an envelope and say “you were so quiet, you didn’t make a sound.”

Can you imagine? Can you imagine the type of person who does that to his kid? Then imagine keeping those stitches in an envelope to show them to her. Imagine how brutal it was for me to be raised by him, and abandoned by her. All of that is wrapped up in this story for me, and I don’t know how to navigate those feelings for others. I don’t always feel I owe it to them, either.

What’s the best way to tell someone what happened to my eye? Does naming it keep it mysterious, do I just say Tom Hollabaugh? Is the more activist way to say “domestic violence” to make people consider what sorts of horrors can happen behind closed doors? Does head trauma really cover it?

What’s the best way to talk about this?

Telling people the whole story often ends in me comforting them, and I don’t always have the emotional capabilities to handle that when I’m in the grocery store.

I’m always looking for the best way to tell a story, but perhaps there isn’t just ONE way with things like this, and it’s one of the harder things for me to navigate with my eye.