When I posted my eighth-grade school photo on TikTok and Instagram a few weeks ago, I expected to get some laughs out of my family and friends — and maybe even a couple of strangers. I didn’t expect the photo to be shared hundreds of thousands of times or be seen by over 20 million people.
The photo features me in 1989, smiling hopefully at the camera with a curtain of long brown hair covering about a third of my face. I’d practiced the look for weeks in my bedroom mirror with the goal of using my hair to cover my lazy eye in my annual school photo. I felt like my lazy eye, known medically as amblyopia, completely defined who I was. I thought that if I could hide it just once, maybe people would see me and think of me as something more than just my eye.
When the prints came back a few weeks later, I was devastated. Not only had I failed to cover the eye with my hair, I had covered just enough of it to make it obvious that I was trying to hide it. A portion of the iris peeked out defiantly from behind the drape of hair like it was photobombing my own photo. The boys who bullied me daily in homeroom class saw the photo and flailed about at their desks in fits of laughter.
I showed my mother and she told me I looked beautiful and immediately slid the picture into an 8×10 frame and placed it on the mantle in the dining room. A few days later, I hid it in a drawer and rearranged the photos that had surrounded it. She noticed immediately and asked me why I’d taken it down. I told her I never wanted to see it again.
Last month, I decided to start posting comedy videos to TikTok and Instagram. I had pursued a career in comedy writing and acting a decade ago and fell into a deep depression when I got knocked down by a series of rejections. When I recently mustered the courage to start posting jokes and sketches to my social media feeds again, I remembered the photo had been a hit with a small theater audience almost 12 years ago.
I posted it on TikTok with a straightforward caption: “8th grade school photo in 1989 when I tried to hide my lazy eye with my hair and it did not work.” I paired the photo with the song “Forever Young” by Alphaville — a song frequently played at my junior high school dances, where no one ever asked me to dance.
The reel seemed to quickly get a lot of engagement, but since I was new to posting publicly, I wasn’t sure how to gauge how much attention was normal. When it passed a million views on TikTok, I started to accept that something big was happening. The photo wasn’t just being “liked,” it was being shared over and over again, and people were tagging friends with crying laughing emojis.
I felt powerful for the first time in a long time. Comedy was where I first found my power. The ability to make someone laugh is to disarm and surprise them — to make them let go of whatever they’re holding on to and bring them into the present moment where they can’t help but feel joy. Comedy, for me, is also about finding those universally hilarious moments that people don’t often talk about and dragging them into the spotlight.
I shared the post on my public Instagram profile and the response was even more incredible. Not long after I shared it, my “insights” dashboard revealed that the post had been viewed over 25 million times by more than 16 million people.
Thousands of comments poured in. One woman said she saw the post on a bus ride home and laughed for 10 minutes straight. I felt like people were laughing with me — not at me. In a single frame, I had inadvertently captured the all-too-familiar experience of a teenager trying to hide who she truly was and failing miserably.
Yes, of course, there were some comments from trolls who responded just like the boys in my homeroom class. There were dozens of comments from men comparing me to Steve Buscemi’s “Crazy Eyes” character in the Adam Sandler movie “Mr. Deeds.”
Others delighted themselves by asking if I’d “gotten kicked by a mule” to straighten my eyes out — a reference to a joke about a crosseyed child character in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
The comments didn’t break me down like they did when I was 13, but they did remind me of how scared I was when I sat down for that photo — and how scared I was all the time at that age. Every interaction I had with someone was an opportunity for them to comment, criticize or ridicule my appearance. I responded to thousands of comments on my posts, but I ignored the bullies. I felt protected, in a way, by the thousands of other people who were laughing along with me.
There were also the comments from people who had lazy eyes. I repeatedly saw people sharing something I never imagined I’d ever encounter: “I had a lazy eye and did this exact same thing with my hair.” One woman wrote, “I still do this in my 40s.” This act that I was sure no one else on earth had tried before was a “thing” for people with lazy eyes, I had just never had the chance — or means — to connect with them before.
Having a lazy eye left me isolated, anxious, depressed and desperate for connection in high school. It was more than just looking different from others. I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone. Like many people with amblyopia, my eyes did not work together. I could focus one eye (usually the left one) on the person I was speaking to, while the other eye drifted all the way to the right. Even when I was making eye contact with people, it was only with one eye, so they couldn’t tell.
I lived in constant dread. Whenever I attempted eye contact, the person I was speaking to would usually look over their left shoulder to see where my right “lazy” eye was looking. They ignored the eye that was looking at them and focused entirely on the one that was not.
My lazy eye profoundly affected my ability to socialize with others. I tried every tactic I could think of to avoid that humiliating “over the shoulder” look. I often kept my eyes on the floor when I was speaking, hoping people would think I was just shy.
When I saw a TikTok user comment, “I used to look at the floor when I was talking to people,” it took my breath away. It was like I had finally found my people.
It’s estimated that 2-4% of the U.S. population has amblyopia. In 1989, with the country’s population at roughly 247 million, that would have meant about 5 million people living with a lazy eye. With no social media at the time, there was no way for me to find and connect with any of them. Thirty-five years later, I finally can.
While many social media users continued to “like” and share the post with its original comedic intent in mind, more and more people began sharing their own experiences of living with a lazy eye. I was flooded with questions about the treatments and surgeries I had tried. Those who looked at my current profile picture saw that the “laziness” of the eye had been corrected and wanted to know how. I even had a mother ask me how to respond to the bullying that she feared her own child with a lazy eye would face. My heart ached when I responded that I really didn’t have a good answer for her.
Not everyone with a lazy eye wants to treat it. I celebrate anyone and everyone with a lazy eye who is able to accept and embrace their condition with no desire to change it. No one should feel they have to get a medical procedure (let alone six of them like I did) to fulfill any sort of external standard of what supposedly looks “good” or doesn’t.
For me, it was a matter of survival.
I originally had two unsuccessful operations at age 3 that had been traumatic for my whole family. My mother was terrified of me undergoing another procedure, but as a teenager, I didn’t care about the physical pain or the risks associated with more surgery. The bullying from my peers drove me to thoughts of suicide, and I was ready to try anything.
It took a month to recover from my third surgery, which I had at 14. I immediately wanted to know when I could get another one to improve the results. A year later, I got my fourth eye surgery. Two years later, I got my fifth procedure. Each surgery got the eye closer to being straight, but doctors told me it would always drift a little.
In my late 20s, I noticed the drift more than ever. People were looking over their shoulders again when I spoke to them. For a long time, I made peace with my condition, but when I had my own child at 39, I wanted him to know I was looking at him.
Though friends and family said the drift was barely noticeable, one night a well-meaning waiter approached my table while I was out to dinner with my husband and said, “I saw you looking in my direction. Can I get something for you?”
I politely declined but after he left, I told my husband, “That’s it. I’m getting surgery again.”
My loved ones were used to the way my eye looked. The waiter, a stranger bearing no ill will toward me, was more objective. I made an appointment for surgery, but my fear got the best of me and I cancelled it. I waited over a year before making another appointment and following through with it. At age 42, I opened my eye in the recovery room and saw the surgeon give me a thumbs-up. He told me it was fixed for life.
About a week after the TikTok and Instagram posts went viral, I recorded a video to share my experience of undergoing four surgeries over 35 years. I received many fewer responses to the video than my original posts, but all of them were warm and supportive. People wished me well. People were happy for me. It was a love fest.
Having a lazy eye for 40 years profoundly impacted who I am as a person. My experience has made me fiercely empathetic and unapologetically truthful about the human condition, because I was unable to escape the experience of being misunderstood. It also made me really funny. I can call out an ironic moment like nobody’s business. I can shine a light on an absurdity like a boss. And for that, I’m grateful.
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Carol Burnett once said that her mother taught her that “tragedy plus time equals comedy.” For me, it has also meant finally feeling “seen” as more than the frightened and ashamed child who was so desperate to hide who she really was.
Liz Brown is a mother, writer, and comedian living in Los Angeles and Northfield, Vermont. She is currently working on a memoir about spending 40 years unable to make eye contact because of her lazy eye. You can follow her on Instagram and TikTok.
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