Cheating at my eye test

At some point in the last year or so my wife told me I needed to go for an eye exam. For a long time I procrastinated on going. But about a month ago I made an appointment and went to the exam. The doctor was in doubt as to whether I needed glasses, but I told him anything he could do to make it a little better would be great.

So I got glasses. It helped a lot. Suddenly I was having far less headaches and I could read my text easier.

But the headaches came back and even though I could read a little better close up I realised that my eyes had problems further off as well. 

I woke from a nap and everything looked really blurry. Curious I covered my left eye, and found that even after the sleep faded I couldn't see very well out of the right. I realised that the headaches forming above my left eye were probably a product of it doing most of the work.

So I went back. With my wife's encouragement I asked the doctor to go through the test more slowly. I had him go back when I hadn't had a chance to look at a slide properly. He got frustrated. He told me this wasn't how the test was supposed to work.

"I'm slow, ok! I need time." I was angry when I said it. I calmed myself so that I wouldn't walk out of the clinic. It wasn't like I was cheating on my eye test. I don't like that I'm slow; I can't help it.

After I explained that one eye was still  did most of the work he looked confused. Then he wrote up a document to send me to a specialist.

And I left, feeling frustrated but relieved that I would be dealing with someone else next time. And then I found out that I had been doing the test wrong. If my goal was to appear to have perfect vision I had. I'm so used to making out blurry letters that I didn't realise I was supposed to be able to read the writing easily. I accidentally cheated at my eye test.

I'm good with computers. One of the reasons for that is my willingness to work around problems. When I notice a bug I find a way to deal with it. I worked at a tech company and while I was sympathetic to our customers not knowing how to use the software we made, I was a bit surprised when my boss and the developers who made didn't know how to use it. I watched them and realised that they didn't use workarounds. When I trained our customers I was in the position of authority. So I could tell them, 'here is the work around for this problem' and they would use it. But my boss wasn't looking for workarounds. It took me a long time to realise he didn't know all the problems in the software because I made it look easy. I used all the workarounds.

And that's the problem too. If I work around a problem it doesn't get fixed. That was the case with the software and that is the case with my eyeglasses. I'm really good at guessing at letters during the exam. But that doesn't mean I'm able to read them. It means I'm working around the problem that I have come to the doctor to address.

I think this is a common problem in ADHD. It's hard to work through problems, so we work around them. That might be why we don't quite finish things like other people do, and why our process looks different. That might be part of why my brain is so messy.