The Weight of a Diploma and a Lazy Eye

Justin Bieber

Okay, so the moment I can't shake is when Ryan turns to Alexa in the middle of his journal and just asks, what's 150 out of 200? And Alexa, totally calm, says three quarters, seventy five percent. And he asks again. Same question, slightly different words. He needed to hear it twice.

Debbie

I get that, honestly. Think about what he's been carrying. He opens the whole entry with this one question: how does somebody born with a lazy eye end up with a high school diploma? He says it twice, like he's setting it on the table. He's 48 now, he still has the lazy eye, and his point is that it was barely mentioned through all those school years. A few trips to the school nurse, a few eye checks, and he says that's not ignoring him completely. But for most of his time there, it was ignored.

Justin Bieber

And then the numbers come in. Alexa says kids with a lazy eye often read around 150 words per minute, compared to about 200, because the brain has to work harder to piece the picture together. Eye strain, squinting, tilting your head. Depth perception takes a hit too, so sports and quick visual stuff can feel off. But with a good seat, regular breaks, and sometimes a patch or glasses, they can keep up.

Debbie

One caution before we run with it. Those figures came from a smart assistant, not from a study Ryan cited, so I'd treat 150 versus 200 as a rough benchmark, not gospel. What I can say is that the direction lines up with real research. There's a 2018 study in JAMA Ophthalmology, small, 50 children with amblyopia in grades 3 to 8, compared with 18 kids without it. The kids with amblyopia rated themselves lower on scholastic, social, and athletic competence. And among the kids with amblyopia, the ones who felt less capable at school were the ones reading more slowly.

Justin Bieber

So Ryan's gut and the lab are kind of singing the same song.

Debbie

Partly. The study is a snapshot, so it shows an association, not a cause. And one detail matters here: the kids' overall sense of self worth didn't differ from the other kids. So it's not that they felt worthless. It's that school specifically, reading, sports, friends, felt harder. That's close to what Ryan describes, a kid grinding through the day while the thing making it harder never gets a name.

Justin Bieber

Then he does the math out loud. 150 over 200 is 75 percent, and he lands on a 25 percent disadvantage. He gets tangled for a second, says something like they're at a 75 percent advantage over you, which isn't quite right.

Debbie

Right, I'd say it plainly. Reading at 150 when the benchmark is 200 means reading at three quarters of the speed. A gap of a quarter. And he's the one who realizes what a quarter means when school is mostly textbooks and chalkboards all day long. His line is basically, what do you need to achieve? You need eyesight to see the board and to read the page.

Debbie

The part I keep turning over is the coin. Ryan says that once you're proud of an achievement, you should be careful not to over research it. Don't look at the wrong data, don't overanalyze. If you flip the coin, you risk disproving yourself, and he wants to keep it heads up.

Justin Bieber

Which is wild, because the same entry is him obsessively asking how he did it. He wants the answer and he's scared of the answer at the same time.

Debbie

That's the tension, yes. He even says it: he was never compared to other students who had a lazy eye. School was his sample, one town, elementary through high school in the same place, and he says that's what school is, a sample study. So he doesn't know how remarkable it was. Who knows, he says. And then he says research can bully you and make your achievement look bad.

Justin Bieber

I want to push back a little, gently. Because the number Alexa gave him doesn't make the diploma smaller. If anything it makes it bigger. Reading at three quarters speed and still getting through, that's not a coin flipping to tails.

Debbie

I think that's the honest read, and I'd say it as my take, not his. But I also understand why he's wary. He's lived through years where information and labels were used against him. So when he says don't listen to bullies who won't call it a miracle, don't listen to research that makes your achievement look bad, I hear someone protecting a hard won story.

Justin Bieber

And he's not saying it's only a miracle. He gives it real reasons. He says it was pressure.

Debbie

Three pressures, in his words. His parents, the law that says you have to go to school, and what he calls town talk, the background chatter about who advances and who becomes a high school dropout. The fear of that label. He thinks plenty of people in his situation would have dropped out, and he says he doesn't blame them at all.

Justin Bieber

There's a sad little detail too. He says they put him in a special reading class for comprehension for years. But the vision part was still unaddressed. He calls that gaslighting.

Debbie

That's his word and his interpretation, and I can see the logic of it. If the question is why reading is hard, and the answer you act on is comprehension while the eye stays unexamined, you're treating a symptom. He also says something that stuck with me: people may have biological disadvantages at school they don't even know about. He never had a brain scan. A lazy eye was found, but who knows what else wasn't. He's not claiming a diagnosis, he's saying the unknown is big.

Justin Bieber

And then the entry swerves into everything else that school was. He mentions the nickname again, Screech, from Saved by the Bell, six years of it. He calls it a TV nickname he didn't want.

Debbie

This connects to earlier episodes, the hallway, the crush, the fear. But here it's attached to his eyes. He's saying the lazy eye, the nickname, and the pressure all stack. The pressure of the lazy eye, the nickname, and people making fun of your performance equals scars, and he says equals distrust.

Justin Bieber

He's got a whole theory of why bullies do it. Someone to call a nerd or the odd one, it makes them feel higher up the ladder. He lists the lines: I showered and you didn't, I have a girlfriend and you don't, I got a better grade. Social comparison, the playground version.

Debbie

And he says you don't need to become the nerd, because you're not the nerd. I'd keep that line. Then he brings up his PE teacher, Jan Alpers, again. He says she saw bullying on the playground and she kicked the kickball and made the students go run after it. He's clear that he thought it was for their own good. A warning first, he says, but if kids keep going, a teacher has no choice but to get tough.

Justin Bieber

And he's fair to her. He points out that a teacher back then might be watching 50 students with no assistant. How do you catch the secret stuff in that?

Debbie

Right, which is his point about secret bullying. It's the version that slips through the cracks. And he says people from Rockwell City, the ones who got away with it, never got set straight, and he feels they're still after him, still distrustful. I'd frame that as how it feels to him, how he reads it. What's solid is that the hurt didn't stop at graduation.

Justin Bieber

Which brings us to the heavy part. He ties his fear to what he calls a strange UFO story, and an Ouija board. And he says he got scared really badly toward his senior year and it's stuck ever since. He takes medication for the fear, and he says that's how he gets through a lot of it.

Debbie

He's also honest that he doesn't know what's true about the Ouija board anymore. He says maybe he bumped his head, he doesn't know, he's kind of given up. And he describes feeling sentenced to crying, and he can't see what he did to deserve it, after hospital visits, flipping a three wheeler, almost drowning. So the burnout he describes at the end of high school is burnout from bullying, from overthinking, and from fear, all at once. I'm not going to pretend I can sort which is which. He says it's never been resolved.

Debbie

I do want to land on the part he's proud of, because it's the most solid thing in the whole entry. College. He walked on, as he puts it, and finished an associate degree. He used Pell Grants and student loans, and he's basically addressing the government directly: I didn't waste your money.

Justin Bieber

I love this part. He says he'd tell political leaders with full confidence, I got a degree with what you gave me. He even says thank you. It could have gone the other way, no government help, and life would have been way harder. He says government can work.

Debbie

And he's specific. An associate degree, and he's about 30 to 40 credits away from a bachelor's. He also says he doesn't feel gaslit in college, which is notable. After years of feeling unseen in school, the college experience at least gave him something tangible he could hold.

Justin Bieber

Then he wanders, and he admits it. He says he kind of got off subject. He starts talking about compulsory showers after gym, about bodies reacting the way bodies do, and how the school teaches you to cover up and then puts you in that situation for about five minutes a day.

Debbie

His take is that it's normal biology, curiosity, nothing to be ashamed of, and that school treats it like something dangerous. He says school becomes dangerous ground for expressing yourself, because people call you out and that hurts development.

Justin Bieber

And then he gets to Jason. He says he was attracted to a classmate, Jason, an athletic, good looking kid who stayed that way all through high school. And he coins this phrase, Jay pride. If you have a crush on Jason, maybe you say, I'm not gay, I'm Jay.

Debbie

I think that's tender and a little funny, and it's also serious. He's wary of labels, says some of them are misleading or negative or trashy, and he wants a positive way to say what he felt without getting hurt for it. And he guesses he wasn't the only boy who noticed Jason, that others had to suppress it because they'd be bullied. That's his speculation, but it paints the picture of a place where feelings got tucked away.

Justin Bieber

He also says he's not sure about his own attractions, that people should give things a chance. I'd just let him say that, it's his to figure out. What I notice is how honest he is about not knowing.

Debbie

And then he drags himself back, which I find oddly moving. He says he wanted to keep the subject on the miracle of a lazy eye. 150 compared to 200 is a significant difference in reading speed, if that's even the standard, and he doesn't want to research it that far. But 150 is different from 200.

Justin Bieber

And the last thing he says is that it hurts. The gaslighting hurts. After all the credits and the loans and the proud math, that's where he leaves it.

Debbie

Both can be true. He did something hard, with a quarter less speed on the page. And nobody made that easier for him when it counted. I think the miracle he's asking about has a simpler name, which is that he kept showing up. Three quarters speed, every single day.