Glasses

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my glasses. It’s hard for me to remember when I didn’t have to wear them.

Sometime toward the end of second grade, it started to become difficult for me to see the chalkboard. This didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. Even from my desk in the back of the room, if I stood up and squinted a little, I could still make out the words. My teacher moved my desk closer to the front of the room, and that was remedy enough at the time.

Little did I know the chalkboard squinting was only the beginning. In the intervening 25 years, my vision has gotten gradually worse. Back then, if I squinted, I could see things that were about 20 feet away. Now, I have to squint to see things that are 5 inches away. Not 5 feet. 5 inches. If I don’t squint, it’s 4.

Obviously, moving to 4 inches away from everything I need to see is not a viable option. I needed a different solution. I got my first pair of glasses during the summer between second and third grade. I’ve had glasses ever since, and also have contacts. Both give me 20/20 vision.  Problem solved, right?

Well, mostly. Unfortunately, glasses are not a perfect solution. New struggles surface when prescription glasses become a permanent part of your life. Take, for example, the simple act of wearing sunglasses. Yes, there are prescription sunglasses. And yes, I can wear regular sunglasses with contacts. But both of those solutions take forethought when you are a regular wearer of glasses. I can’t just leave a pair of sunglasses in my bag and expect to be able to wear them if the sun happens to come out. My prescription glasses are pretty much an extension of my body; I don’t usually have conscious awareness that I am wearing them. More often than not, if bright sun comes out and I happen to have sunglasses on me, I absent-mindedly try to put them on over my prescription glasses, and then curse under my breath when I realize that my choice is between glaring sunlight with clear vision and muted sunlight with extremely blurry vision. In most cases, the latter is not a workable option.

Other struggles are related to times when I can’t wear my glasses at all. For example, hairstylists almost always ask me to remove my glasses before they start cutting my hair. At fancier places, they even take them off my face for me as they wet my hair at the shampoo bowl, leaving the location of my glasses and the state of my hair a complete mystery to me. I typically fumble from the shampoo bowl to the styling chair, and then sit listening to snipping sounds and watching a head-shaped blob in the mirror two feet away, hoping for the best. “What do you think so far?” the stylist will ask. “How do you like the length? Is that where your part usually is?”

“No idea,” I say. “I can’t see it.”

Then there is the matter of shaving my legs. This is a task I abhor in general, mostly because it doubles the time it takes me to shower, but my uncorrected nearsightedness makes it far worse. Wearing my glasses is not an option in the shower. Yes, I can see my legs even without my glasses on. But can I see the tiny, pretty-much-translucent-when-wet hairs on my legs? Nope. I can wear contacts, but honestly. I can’t wear contacts to work—looking at a screen all day dries them out—so on I work day I’d be putting in contacts just for the sake of showering, then removing them pretty much immediately when I get out of the shower. I’m not going to do that. So instead, I bumble through dragging the razor across my legs, attempting to use shaving cream to keep track of my progress, but inevitably finding patches of unshaven skin an hour or two later. You know, when I’m already dressed and out of the house and can’t do anything about it.

I have recently discovered a new thing to struggle with: applying eye makeup. Here’s the thing: When I am close enough to the mirror for my eye to be in focus, I am so close that there is not enough room between my face and the mirror for the hand that is applying the makeup. I can’t wear my glasses; they’d get in the way. I can’t wear contacts; I’d have to take them out before going to work, and the act of doing so would destroy the makeup I just put on. In order to wear eyeliner, I’ve had to devise an elaborate system wherein I open my medicine cabinet door, move the outer edge of the mirror super close to one eye while the hand that is doing the makeup application is next to the edge. Ergo, when applying makeup to my left eye, my right eye is super close to the mirror with my hand extending back behind it, and vice versa. The only problem is that I can’t quite turn my head far enough to the right to see the left edge of my left eye. If you notice that my eyeliner is smooth on the inner half of my eyes but a little smudgy around the outer edges, now you’ll know why.

What is my point? Well, I guess I have two of them. One is that I clearly have ridiculous first-world problems, and you should play me a song on the world’s tiniest violins.

What got me thinking about this, though, is was watching an episode of What Not to Wear—a show that I love—and saw the makeup artist encourage a woman to shed her glasses in favor of contacts. Don’t hide behind those glasses! Let the world see your beauty!

This year has included a number of efforts to help me feel better about myself, so after that What Not to Wear episode, I considered whether I should try harder to find contacts that I can wear at work. Do my glasses make me feel self conscious? Do I like wearing them?

As I thought about this, my above list of glasses-related annoyances came to mind. I can’t wear sunglasses! I can’t watch my hair being cut! I can’t see when I shave my legs! Putting on eyeliner is nearly impossible! Regularly wearing contacts would solve all these things. “Maybe I should get them,” I thought.

But then I realized that all of these issues have absolutely nothing to do with my appearance, how I think about myself, or how other people perceive me. My woes are not about wearing glasses. They are about being extremely nearsighted. Bad vision is the problem. Glasses are the solution. An imperfect one, as previously stated, but a solution and ergo not the problem.

For reasons I can’t understand, a stereotype continues to abound that says glasses make women look nerdy and unattractive. Makeover shows (even ones I like!) continue to push women to shed their glasses in favor of contacts on the implicit assumption that they will look more appealing without glasses. Movies continue to treat the act of a woman taking off her glasses as a huge reveal of the beauty underneath the beast.

Well, screw that. Glasses are awesome. Glasses are a wondrous invention that should be embraced. Believe me, you’d only need to experience my vision without glasses for a few minutes to realize how wondrous they are. Bonus: with all the beautiful, cute frames that are out there now, they are also fun accessories!

My second point, then, is simple. Sometimes it sucks to need vision correction. But it’s not the glasses that suck. It’s the nearsightedness. Get it straight, Hollywood. Glasses are awesome. Women who wear them are awesome. They might have smudgy eye makeup, slightly hairy legs, and perhaps a little bitterness about bright sunlight, but wearing glasses doesn’t make them less beautiful or amazing. Glasses are just a tool they use to help them be awesome when their eyes aren’t cutting it.