I have a (thankfully mild) inherited retina disorder. If you read the part about lasers and eye damage it’s basically that, but the “lasers” are faulty genes rather than anything external causing the eye damage. And I can verify that at first my brain did an incredibly good job at error-correcting over it, but in the last couple years it’s finally been able to “peek through”. One day I was hiking and suddenly had black spots in my vision. Then after that I woke up one morning and noticed large black halos in my vision that went away after a couple seconds of being awake. A couple weeks later and I started getting flashing visual artifacts in the edge of my vision.

Which is/was terrifying because I didn’t know this was a multi-decade process I was just becoming aware of and instead assumed that if I just noticed this much visual degradation in a couple weeks then surely I’ll be completely blind in a couple more? Thankfully that’s not how it works, the damage has been increasing at a slow steady constant, it’s just that the processes in place to correct for said damage do a _really_ good job at hiding it, until they don’t, so the rate of degradation seems much worse than it actually is.

That said, please if you notice any new visual artifacts get them checked up on _immediately_, while my case is a slow genetic issue sometimes it’s a detached retina, which can happen for any number of reasons and can usually be reversed quite easily with surgery if caught early. I was “lucky” mine was genetic rather than physical trauma, since I didn’t go see someone until things got noticeably worse.