My name is Julia, I was born in 1992 and I live in colorful and loud Berlin.
My dad once told me that he found out something was wrong with my left eye with the help of a sparkler.
He covered my right eye and realized that I had no reaction to the sparkler.
I was one year old at the time.

The diagnosis was retinoblastoma.
My left eye had to be removed.
At the age of six, a recurrence occurred in my right eye, which was successfully destroyed by radiotherapy.

I don’t remember much about the course of the illness, I can’t really remember the visits to the hospital.
But I do remember that I always loved my parents’ house when I spent the night there with my mother.
As a child, I didn’t really notice my prosthetic eye, I did everything I wanted to do.
It wasn’t until puberty that the fact that I had a prosthetic eye started to eat away at my self-confidence.
That’s still the case today on some days.
However, these insecurities about my appearance are completely normal, for other girls it was a big nose, protruding ears, a gap in their teeth or something else.
And for me it was the slightly different looking eye.
So what?

I try to always think positively and not let negative thoughts get me down.
I work in a delicatessen and you might think that waitressing isn’t the best side job for someone with a limited field of vision.
But I’ve proven to myself that I can do it.
My motto: keep getting up, straighten your crown and keep going and, most importantly, never lose faith in yourself!

Julia
Encourager