It is estimated that about half of the world is nearsighted, up to 10% is farsighted, and the lucky ducks in the middle see the world clearly without any vision aids at all.
I fall into the nearsighted category, make that the EXTREMELY nearsighted category. When I don’t have my glasses on, the whole world is as fuzzy as an angora sweater and I doubt I’d recognize my own children if they were more than three feet away and weren’t calling me “mom.”
I began wearing glasses in fourth grade, switching to contacts in high school. I think soft contact lenses existed in those days, but hard contact lenses were cheaper and better for myopia — at least that’s what my parents told me.
The agony of getting used to hard contact lenses was akin to having someone blow sand in your eyes for hours on end, but since I was young and vain I endured the pain and wore my glasses only at home where just family members could refer to me as “four eyes,” “Miss Buddy Holly,” “Clark Kent,” etc.
Now that I’m neither young nor vain I decided to drop the contacts, even though today’s contacts are a breeze to wear compared to the old tortuous hard plastic version. The glasses I now wear are trifocals with a much stronger prescription, all of which leaves little doubt that Bette Davis was spot on when she said getting older wasn’t for sissies.
I had a few pairs of contact lenses left when I made the switch from contacts back to glasses. I held onto them thinking I could wear them if we ever went to a fancy restaurant for dinner and I wanted to give the glam look a shot. Since those spare contacts have been waiting in their saline solution for about five years, I think that speaks volumes about our lifestyle as well as our restaurant preferences (fast food, anyone?). The glam ship sailed a long time ago, although I have my doubts it ever found a port in our household in the first place.
Late last winter we had a snowstorm that ended up leaving three-foot-high drifts in our driveway. Remembering what a pain it is to wear glasses when shoveling snow (they fog up quite annoyingly and trifocals make it hard to figure out where to look through your glasses to see what the heck you’re shoveling), I remembered the contacts and decided to put on a pair.
Big mistake. I received one of the major shocks of my life after popping those bits of plastic onto my eyeballs. The trifocals I wear must be of the rose-tinted variety because those contacts revealed a somewhat disheartening reflection when I looked in the mirror. It was like looking at the picture of Dorian Gray, only in reverse. Lines, bags, and sags — oh, my! Surely that all hadn’t happened overnight?
Needless to say, the contacts came out and went promptly into the garbage can. Tis better to shovel with fogged up glasses than deal with reality.
As I shoveled, I pondered the Nancy Drew Mystery of the Suddenly High Definition Mirror with the Horrific Reflection and realized that I had been used to looking at the bathroom mirror every morning without any visual prescription aids at all which explains why there have been times when I wasn’t wearing my glasses and I could have sworn I didn’t look a day over fifty. Well, fifty-five.
Of course, the entire world looks a lot better when I go glasses free and I’m occasionally tempted to try to make it through a whole day blessedly nearsighted, but resist the urge. I may like the world a little on the fuzzy side, but it’s much safer to be able to see beyond the hood of the car when in traffic.
Being extremely nearsighted isn’t always such a bad thing. I’ve heard many of the Impressionist painters were also nearsighted and that certainly worked out well for them. They saw the world as a dreamy, smudged, beautiful place which it can be for all the myopic souls out there, as long as they keep their glasses off, the bathroom lights low and contact lenses safely in its saline solution.
Nell Musolf is a freelance writer based in Mankato. She can be reached at nmusolf@gmail.com.