Flotsam 1 : My Personal Struggle and triumph over floaters

About 10 years ago I was sitting at my desk at work. I had just moved from another office and was settling in to my new surroundings. My walls were newly painted with a flawless coat of white paint and I was pondering what pictures use to decorate this lovely blank canvas of wall. I suddenly noticed that the wall was not quite as unblemished as I had previously thought. I noticed a blurry cobweb high up on the wall. Looking across the room to see if there were others, I noticed that the cobweb swung across my field of vision too and settled into another position! This was my first rude introduction to Mr Floater and his family and friends who would become my companions for the weeks and months ahead.

Flotsam 2: My Personal Struggle and triumph over floaters

Over the next weeks and months the floater family became more frequent visitors and a horrible distraction which I began to resent intensely. Sitting in my office trying to come up with a solution to a pending work problem often ended up with me conducting an analysis of the floating cobwebs that plagued me. I studied the way they looked and the way they floated and moved across my vision. A walk on beautiful summers day was ruined by these persistent grey floating strings. Hours of googling on my laptop in search of a cure produced nothing. I was disgusted by the number of scam sights designed to take money from those desperate to rid themselves form these unwelcome guests. I was determined to get rid of these floaters, reading every website that offered some faint hope. I even contacted a eye surgeon that used a laser to break up the larger floaters in a risky bid to lessen their pesky visual affects. Tempting as it was, the risks of laser treatment was just too high when weighed up with the fact that floaters, although unpleasant, was actually a benign condition that didn't pose any serious health risk. But my quest continued.

Flotsam 3 : My Personal Struggle and triumph over floaters

During my period of floater investigation I came across some scholarly web sites that recommended that I ignore the floaters and that they would eventually go away. Other sites suggested that that the floaters would get less with time and that with old age, they may even completely disappear. The advice on these websites held some grains of truth in them but they failed to convince or satisfy me. The more I worried about these floaters, the more they seemed to dominate my vision. The more they stressed me out, the more stressed I became and the more clearly they appeared. I even downloaded a program to simulate the floaters on my computer screen and to track them. I figured that if I recorded their shape and positions, I would be able to tell if my condition was getting any worse. I spent hours describing what floaters were to anyone who would listen and to friends who had no clue what I was talking about. I enjoyed sharing my frustration with others who had floaters of their own, which allowed us to commiserate together over the fact that there was no cure.

Flotsam 4: My Personal Struggle and triumph over floaters

One afternoon I was invited to hear a motivational speaker talk about his  personal success as a sportsman. Something he said in his talk got my immediate attention. He said : "You concentrate on what you focus on". It seemed like a very obvious statement but the point he was trying to make was that in order to achieve something great one needs to fix ones eyes on something and focus on it exclusively. It suddenly dawned on me what an incredible truth that is. If we focus on what is bad in our lives, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The more we focus on the bad, the more it dominates our life. And the more it dominates our life, the more stressed we become and the worse we feel. No wonder we are urged to "count our blessings". The more we focus on our blessings the less we see our personal hardships and the better we feel. From that day on, I stopped obsessing about the floaters. On a lovely summer day, I would not look up at the sky and purposely try to find the offending cobwebs. I started practicing looking past the floaters. Looking through the floaters. In the same way we need to look past and beyond our present difficulties. What applies in the cognitive world applies equally in the physical realm.

But how do you practice shifting your focus from the floaters to the real world when your vision looks a little like a dirty windscreen? One way that I found to look at this was to cast my mind back to when I was a child, playing hide and seek. Hiding inside the hedge, I could look through the gaps in the leaves and see the other children walking past. My gaze was so focused on the activity outside the hedge, I didn't see the leaves and twigs that completely surrounded me so engrossed was I in the world outside the hedge.

With time I learnt to always look through and past the floaters and they do not bother me to this day. Sure, I can see them if I want to. It is as easy as shifting my focus to the floaters and ignoring the world beyond them. Almost like studying the marks on the cars windscreen rather than looking at the beautiful road and scenery ahead.