Colour Blind

I had blue eyes when I was a baby, like a lot of people do. (The reason for this is the absence of a chemical called 'melanin', which gives hair and skin and eyes their colouration. The body produces it in response to sunlight, of which there isn't any in-utero.) Most children born with blue eyes attain their natural permanent eye colour within the first year, but in my case it took over five years. As a result, I have pretty conscious memories of how I felt about my eyes turning a different colour.

The weird bit is that I distinctly remember worrying that they would turn out brown or hazel. I really, seriously didn't want that to happen. Almost everyone in my immediate circle at the time--relatives, friends, teachers--overwhelmingly had brown or hazel eyes and I thought it was too common and didn't want to be just like everyone else.

I was not a kid who bravely marched to their own beat. I was--and still am--obsessively preoccupied with fitting in and getting people to like me, so the fact that I desperately desired an immediately apparent and visible trait different from everyone else doesn't square with my normal way of thinking. For some reason I just really wanted this particular thing to be unusual. So for a while I had a disproportionately anxious time wondering what colour my eyes would end up being.

In the end, I didn't grow up to have the brown or hazel eyes I didn't want. I no longer have blue eyes, of course, but I'm really quite proud of my eye colour. It's pretty uncommon. They're a sort of dusty green, and I also ended up having a semi-rare colour mutation called 'central heterochromia'. Hetereochromia refers to eyes that are two different colours. Usually it's each iris being a different colour but central heterochromia is having a different colour ringing the pupil. In my case it's a yellow ring around the pupil.

I call that little ring my 'sunburst' and the picture makes it appear brown, but in real life it's very yellow in colour.

They're a fairly arrestingly noticeable physical feature, and I've been asked more than once if I'm wearing coloured contacts. Nope, I'm all original parts. I just have really awesome-looking eyes.