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When I was a young woman, I had no idea how worthy of respect I was. I spent all my time trying to convince other people of something I didn’t believe myself: You should love me. If only I had valued what I already had. If only I’d stopped throwing myself at the world in hopes of being caught — only to find myself in someone’s prison: their lower opinion of me.
I find the same is going on these days with our eyeballs. We don’t really respect their worth to us. We give them indiscriminately to whoever offers the loudest, most sensational distraction. The marketing world is after our eyes. The literary world. Netflix, HBO, Showtime. Billboards by the highway. CNN, Fox News. Everyone’s after our eyes.
It’s only recently that I’ve started realizing there are people on the other side of my screen paying attention to what I watch. Or at least trying to. It makes me ask: What if I treated my eyeballs as the true asset that they are? What difference would it make to how I live?
To find out, I’m doing this experiment. I try to consciously remember — before I watch a show or a clip or whatever — that I’m letting someone else use my eyes for their benefit. And I try to make sure the relationship is consensual. A lot of the time, it is. But sometimes, like the other day when I was watching a stupid show just to pass the time, I decided No. I don’t want to give…
