how i eroticized being a cyclops

and other mythologies

I work privately with people interested in erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentorships and natal chart readings are open.

I’m often asked how to live an erotic life with a disability. Because each body writes its own singular mythology, I’ll tell you how I eroticized my own instead. I don’t use the word disability. Words time-capsuled in myth sit closer to truths I see myself in. Ancient cultures name me a seer with the mind of an eclipse and the heart of rapture. My soul is old enough to recognize its language in the mouths of the elder gods.

I was born cross-eyed. I have an eye condition called Strabismus. I don’t see in 3D. I almost always use my left eye to see and experience chronic pain and headaches. My brain receives an image from each of my eyes separately and prioritizes one while working twice as hard to omit input from the other, enough to manage double vision.

My EEGs have stumped experts accusing me of hard drugs. My erotic intimacy with the present moment labels me neurodivergent. I eroticized neurodivergence by becoming self-employed and suffering through the learning curves required because my mind doesn’t experience time, focus or energy in normative ways. I studied my erotic flow state and built the structure of my life around my deepest desires instead of forcing myself to perform aliveness on command. I decided to be myself for a living.

I find eroticism to be the most iconic way to unmask.

I recently read Strabismus and neurodivergence are correlated. Science is usually eons behind poetry. In ancient cosmologies, an injured eye marked a threshold between worlds. Tiresias, in The Odyssey, becomes prophetic through blindness. Odin, in the Prose Edda, trades an eye for forbidden knowledge. The Graeae, in the myth of Perseus and the Gorgons, guard forbidden knowledge through a shared eye. Horus, in the Contendings of Horus and Set, loses and restores an eye through divine conflict, transforming damaged sight into sacred vision. Argus Panoptes, in the myth of Io and Hera, perceives the world through a body covered in eyes that never fully sleep. Balor, in the myth of The Battle of Mag Tuired, possesses a destructive supernatural eye whose gaze transforms whatever it touches. And, cyclopes in Greek mythology are one-eyed beings associated with unbridled power, savage brutality or divine craftsmanship, and otherworldly perception. Known as primordial artisans, they craft weapons for the gods.

In fairy tales, the theme continues. One-Eye and Three-Eyes, in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, are sisters whose unusual numbers of eyes mark them as uncanny, otherworldly figures defined through altered perception itself. The Snow Queen alters perception through a shard of enchanted glass lodged in the eye.

One eye turned elsewhere, double vision, blindness, trance sight, perception split between worlds—my vision was mythologized as contact with the underworld the moment I was born a Scorpio rising at Pluto’s degree the week of an eclipse in Scorpio. My parents fled bombs in Beirut weeks before, as my mom was 9 months pregnant. I almost died at birth. Umbilical cord wrapped around my throat like a noose, I met Hades before I took my first breath. Saturn, the planet of restriction is also in my first house of the physical body. Something surrendered to heighten inner vision. The south node made sure of it. My parents smuggled a pint-sized prophet out of a warzone. Their bedroom was bombed just a couple of weeks later.

Unable to make eye contact with anyone, despite a surgery a year after I was born, I wore prisms in my glasses that centered my eyes cosmetically. No one but my family, and one friend, saw me without my glasses. I told no one. I had my second surgery at 15, on summer break, where they removed my eyes and cut the muscles in order to stretch them back and stich them in place. I woke with only the whites of my eyes showing. My mom tried to hide what she saw but I felt the familiar tug of surrender at my heels. My surgeon didn’t tell my mom nor I that I’d need to do eye exercises for a month to bring my eyes to center. She didn’t say I needed vision therapy either. Some people are purists and see only one tool. These folks are closest to the archetype of poverty. I wish for her exactly who she is. If that’s a hex, she’s a hex. One of my favorite spells is putting a name on a mirror cause, what’s wrong babe?

Two surgeries later and my eyes aren’t crossed but, I don’t have binocular vision. I use 2D cues, like shapes, colors and motion, to perceive space. When sleepless, my right eye wanders and I have a harder time blocking out its input. I don’t drive though I did for most of my adult life until finally deciding the suffering outweighed the desire. I count each step on every staircase. Because they all look the same, I’m not sure if I’m seeing double. My eyes are very sensitive to light so I wear sunglasses wherever I am. I feel where something is with my hands before I trust where I see it. I can see an inch to my right by switching eyes instead of moving my head. This is most helpful when I’m sculpting and want to stay in the light I’m in instead of finding a new position.

I see colors. I see long, dark shadows. Unlived souls lock eyes with me. I nod. It took me a long time to accept that most people are too afraid of their dark to go back for themselves. That anyone back there is in enemy territory. I often avoid eye contact with strangers because it stirs demons who haven’t been seen in years. Their keeper forgot who they were a long time ago and the curse is cast every moment the ego collects memories. That’s how magic works. Repetition and certainty.

I’ll never forget the moment someone reached out to me after I shared some vision therapy homework on IG. She said she’d lost her 3D vision after a car accident, that she cried every day at how flat the world looked, that she couldn’t pour milk into a bowl, that she spilled everything. It stands out to me because one day, in my mid 30s, a doctor placed a prism in front of my right eye and I saw as people see. I burst out into tears. The world, in that little exam room, was so very alive. Vision therapists haven’t been able to replicate it since, and I try to remember the moment only as often as necessary to keep the memory in that sweet spot between reality and a memory of a memory.

Maybe one day, it’ll align with the right doctor. Neither the first nor second surgeon told my parents about vision therapy so when I found out about it at a routine eye exam in my 30s, I was referred to a university to work with students during their lab hours. They worked specifically with Strabismus but, every patient there was a child. They had no expertise with adults. I was given a poor prognosis for having waited so long. I decided to stop going, to wait until I could afford working with a specialist—someone up for a challenge.

I believe I was meant to turn inward toward symbols before ordinary consensus reality, to find and thrive in a different depth of vision. And then, to bring it forward. The left eye is linked to lunar perception, emotional depth, intuition, dream-sight, sensitivity and receptive vision. As a Cancer moon eclipsing my own sun, Apollo’s realm dulled while a moonfed inner eye took on more saturation. My inner life is a cosmology I can see in full dimension.

Some days, I feel grief for the world I can’t see, the ache in my eyes and the strange sensation of viewing the world from the left side of my face. Most days, I think it’s pretty amazing that I unknowingly did vision therapy on myself when I read books as a kid. I’m told it should be very difficult to track words on a page and trying to read should result in dizziness or nausea. I suffered through it young, because I loved reading. Narrators felt as perceptive as I did. They knew so much about everyone in the stories, quietly. My intuition felt at home. I spent several hours a day reading and then, writing. I remember having a hard time, but I made it non-negotiable. Desire creates worlds.

I eroticized being a cyclops by becoming masterful with my inner eye. I edge every insight to its deeper truths, and I don’t stop gazing at the place where I found it. I transform all of the time. I’m doing it right now. The amount of privacy I feel comfortable with is in exact opposition to sending this essay out but I will. I choose the change I desire every day. I surrender to the vast, erotic unknown as a way of life. I’ve made peace with the idea Joseph Pearce talks about in The Crack in a Cosmic Egg, that the insight making mechanism is that which is universal, not the insights themselves. I find new psychic land to stand on. I create inner and outer ecologies that allow me to make eye contact with new identities that were always mine. I become what I fall in love with and envy. There’s no limit to transformation when you recognize what you desire, when you know you can become it, when becoming it feels enlivening. This path has led me to an erotic animist spirituality where everything is alive.

With one eye, I read authors who challenge me. I write as often as I can. I make art that allows my inner life entry into the world. I call the artifacts I create moonfed because they’re my mirrors. Even a seer wants to be seen. I’m a high femme cyclops, feathered lashes fanning my saturated visions. I choose divine, erotic craftsmanship over savage brutality but as Tupac said, don’t push me. Turns out the weapon I’ve been crafting for the gods was me. I sever reality with new life.

I use color to its fullest expression. I gift myself saturation wherever it feels good to do. Enter neon pink hair, my lovecore home, my love of vivid paints and gold leaf, my refusal of beige living.

To be clear, I find neurotypical norms inhumane. When I had my EEG done, years ago, I was scared I’d be found out for being an alien, for something being terribly wrong. One of the first sketches I did as a kid said in big, bold letters, What’s the point in being different when everyone is the same? I showed everyone and no one had an answer for me. I wasn’t surprised when my boss called me a liar and accused me of being on drugs. I wasn’t surprised to see that in most measures, I was several standard deviations away from the mean. Compared to a “normative population,” I shouldn’t be able to function. That’s all I heard from the man who I thought would fire me. You shouldn’t be able to be *waves haphazardly at me.* What aren’t you telling me? I was surprised he wasn’t curious enough to find out. Was it because I was an employee getting the report for free? Was it because I was a woman? A middle eastern person? I still don’t know. I do know I was sent away, in irritation, to my desk with the interpretation section of the report left blank. I still believe the report was speaking in a language he couldn’t read. I’m sure his EEG was normal.

Eroticism is a divergence from the norms. Being present to a world of desire and depth, often avoided until death, is a divergence. The norms are inhumane. I became myth instead.

eros, always,
Nairy

Questions for my advice column can be submitted by paid subscribers.

I work privately with people interested in erotic transformation, desire, creativity and mythic depth. Mentorships and natal chart readings are open.