Most people expect their midlife crisis to involve a motorcycle, a bad tattoo, or at least a questionable haircut. Mine? Cataracts. At 45.
Losing your sight — even temporarily, even fixably — does something strange to your brain. For me, it stripped away excuses. If I couldn’t see well enough to drive, or binge Netflix, or even read easily, then what could I do? I could write. Not perfectly, not comfortably, but stubbornly.
My eyes may have artificial lenses now, but I still think they’re pretty amazing.
Cataracts took my natural clarity for a while — surgery gave it back. The great part about eye surgery, at least cataract surgery, is you would never know to look at them.
I call my eyes hazel, but they shift with whatever I’m wearing — sometimes green, sometimes blue, always threaded with gold. My writing does the same. It changes depending on the light: grounded and mysterious, uncanny and speculative, always layered. Nothing is ever just one thing.
Writing became my way of proving I still existed when the world was blurring around me. I needed a creative outlet and frankly something to do with my time other than stare at the blurriness surrounding me. And when the surgeries were done, the stories didn’t stop. By then, I was hooked.
So yeah, my origin story isn’t glamorous. It’s not “I always knew I’d be an author.” It’s more like: “My eyeballs betrayed me, so I made something out of the blur.” And honestly? I think that grit — that insistence on making sense out of a mess — bleeds into everything I write.
And looking back, I realize my eyes even influenced the color palette I chose for Ruthie. The greens, blues, and golds weren’t an accident — they were serendipitous, maybe inevitable. If you don’t like it then blame my traitorous eyeballs for the branding. 😅
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