Update on My Eyes and What This Means for My Online Activity

Regarding the situation with my eyes, I recently saw an eye doctor. I did wonder if he would find a cataract, glaucoma, or some other damage to the eye since I am 48. I try to protect my eyes as much as I can, but you can’t fight all of the effects of getting older. This thing will my dry eye has gotten progressively worse over the years. I thought there might be another situation I was dealing with. It turns out there isn’t anything wrong with my eyes. I was very relieved to hear it.

My tear ducts going from my eyes down to my nose are narrow, and age did factor into that. As I’ve gotten older, they’ve gotten more narrow. All I can do is mitigate the situation the best I can. I don’t want to do surgery to widen them. I don’t think I’m at the point where it’s necessary, and the eye doctor agrees. I have warm compresses, which I’ve been using for years, but I was told about eyelid scrubs to use before bed to help keep the eyelids clean. I have a new eyeglass prescription coming. (My last one was two years ago, so there’s not much difference there, but I did request that the lenses be coated to make computer use easier. My current pair, while coated, have tiny scratches on the lenses, and I’m sure that doesn’t help.)

I haven’t figured out how much time to devote to the computer. I can’t do as much as I used to. That’s been the biggest problem I’ve been tackling. I did go to settings, as two people on here suggested, and made the computer screen as “warm” as it’ll go. This helped. I also got a new pair for my old prescription a month ago with a new layer on it to protect me from eye strain. That helped, too. But there’s really only so much I can do.

My eyes fare better when I’m away from the computer. So I’m trying to figure out the best way to proceed. My eyes seem to do okay when I stick with the Word document. That’s good news because I need Word to write. My eyes don’t do as well when I go on the internet. I don’t know what it is about the websites that make my eyes get tired, but if I spent more than an hour on the internet, I can feel the strain in my eyes, even with the “warm” screen and my lenses to protect against eye strain. I don’t think I can stay completely off social media. I have a couple of people I keep in touch with on MeWe and Facebook. (I’m on Facebook under my pen name.) But the days of me posting and reading other people’s posts have to stop. The time I spend on email isn’t much, but I need that social media time to devote to emails. Emails are hard for me. They strain my eyes a lot, so I try not to do them more than a couple times a week, and when I do, I can only answer so many of them at a time before I need to get away from the computer. I need to do these blog posts because it’s how I let people know what is going on with my books and when my books will be out. It’s pretty much the only marketing I do for my books. Plus, I do enjoy the comments.

It’s frustrating, to say the least, that I have to choose what to do and what not to do. I’m sure it seems like I’m not interested in people. Please understand that if I take time to respond to a comment or email, I am interested. I just can’t be online as much as I’d like to. I always thought once my kids were grown up, I’d be able to devote more time online. It’s not turning out that way. As disappointed as I am, I have to accept my limitations. My priority has to be the books. If I do nothing else, I will keep writing those. The next priority is this blog. Writing here helps me focus. I usually figure out what to do next in a story or get a new story idea from posting here. Writing in a private journal doesn’t have the same benefit. I don’t know why. But I also love talking about the benefits of writing for passion because that reminds of why I enjoy writing. This keeps me centered and focused. If I can help others, that’s a plus. The other stuff I do will come as my eyes allow.