Why my eyes itch

           I have a new thing to add to my list of things that cause me trouble with my visual imapirment.  As a person suffering from Star Gardt's disease I spend the greater part of my life trying to circumvent my shortcomings.  Simple tasks such as shaving require concentration and a seperate set of skills from the majority of humanity. 
        This has also carried over into the writing process for me.  Writing a story doesn't require much except a program called Zoomtext which magnifies a portion of the screen and scrolls with the text that I am writing.  Where things get really interesting is when I go back to revise my work and proof read.  Since I have no central vision and I look at the world out of the corner of my eye so to speak, I have to slow the editing process down to an absolute crawl.  Each letter has to be carefully scrutinized even with spell check.  This is especially true to proper names that spell check doesn't usually pick up on.  A few pages of revising and I literally feel an itch and sometimes a pulsing across the surface of my eyes.  The tricky part is to know when to stop and avoid the piercing headache that this work inevitably produces.  It isn't uncommon for me to have to take a thirty minute nap every couple hours just to let the muscles in my eyes to relax.  The process is usually done at a one of the higher settings in my adaptive software and the curse is that the higher the magnification the more I lose my place in the text.
         All frustrations aside it's very rewarding to find a creative outlet for me to explore.  I largely taught myself to play the trumpet when I was in midle school an achievement I was quite proud of.  I hit a wall with try to read sheet music with my visual impairment and as the musical pieces got longer they became harder for me to memorize.  I eventually abandoned the trumpet and have spent the intervening years searching and struggling to find a way to explore my creative side and it appears that writing fiction is finally combining all the things I need to adapt and overcome my disability.
        I still have a lot to learn and I have appreciated all the advice and those who have taken time out of their busy lives to help me along and I will always be grateful to them.  I only hope that the enjoyment of writing will one day outshine the enjoyment of others reading my material.