When I was a kid, I had to wear a huge eyepatch for a year. The story started like this: I was on my scooter, I wasn't wearing a helmet, I was going down a steep hill, and you know the rest. A quarter of the skin on my face ripped off and I tore a muscle in my eye. I had to take months of eye therapy, and after that didn't work, surgery.

I sort of hated my eyepatch—none of the other kids had one, so I felt weird. Like, why doesn't the princess in my picture book have anything wrong with her? And I know it was just an eyepatch and many kids have it more than a hundredfold worse, but to my kid mindset, it was a quarter to the end of the world. I thought it was so bad that in pictures, I would cover up my eye so I wouldn't remember it in the future.

A bit later, my family was on a road trip and my dad took me to an ocean-themed museum. There were actors there who pretended to be mermaids and pirates. One of the pirates saw me from the crowd and said something like: "Arrrr, looks like we have another pirate here!" I'd like to imagine he winked at me with the eye under his eyepatch. After that, I was like, "Hey, I'm a pirate!" and was sort of proud of my eyepatch. It sounds stupid typing this out, but my six-year-old self really turned a 180 after that.

I was thinking about it the other day and I wanted to hear if you Pandas have experienced something like that. Hopefully, my faith in humanity increases after reading a reply.