For as long as I can remember I have had to wear some form of corrective lenses to be able to see the world clearly. They’ve become a part of who I am, and for most of the day I forget they’re even there. However, as with most things, there are some people who don’t have to face the same things I do every day, and there are a lot of questions and comments that people make about vision to me. Here I attempt to give a little bit of insight (haha, get it? Sight?) into the everyday life of someone with bad vision.
To start off, we have the distinction between glasses and corrective lenses. While glasses ARE corrective lenses, they are not the only kind, and a lot of people forget that. For the first couple years of high school, I wore nothing but contact lenses, which led people to think that I had normal vision. One day near the beginning of Junior year, however, I wore my glasses for a “just woke up” spirit day and I got a lot of comments along the lines of, “Oh, did you just get glasses? They look great on you!” My response every time was just, “No, I’ve had them for as long as you’ve known me.” This made a lot of people who I didn’t regularly hang out with confused as they thought back to see if they remembered me with glasses. Even people who themselves wear contacts forget that other people don’t necessarily have to be wearing glasses to have bad vision, and it’s always funny but a little annoying to mess with people when they find out.
Along the lines of contacts, the most often asked question I get is, “how can you stick your finger in your own eye?” The answer is you get used to it. The first few times it's super creepy, and honestly, I almost bailed on them simply because of the fact that you had to touch your eye. However, you soon realize that your eye is not as delicate as you think (it’s still super delicate but it can survive some light poking) and that contacts are designed to go specifically in your eye and that makes the process a lot less stressful and scary. Another question I get is, “do they ever bother you? I can imagine something in your eye all the time would bug me a bunch.” Again, contacts are designed specifically to go in your eye, and as such, they don’t bother once they’re in. They do occasionally shift around, especially later in the day when they begin to dry out, but a few quick blinks usually put them back in place. Once you get past the jitters of the first few times, the convenience of not having to worry about them getting wet or falling off and the freedom they open in terms of peripheral vision, sports, etc. quickly makes them worth it.
On to the most important part of this article, here is an analogy to attempt to explain what it is like when we try to see without our glasses. If you’ve ever looked through a window when it’s raining, you notice that the rain drops deform the way things look on the other side. They look wavy and distorted, and often you can’t tell exactly what something is without a little bit of effort. This isn’t exactly what it’s like, but it’s a start. The idea that people and objects become more like colored blobs is accurate, but the biggest difference between the window and glasses-less eyes is that not only do things become blurry but they also become fuzzy and start to meld together into bigger shapeless blobs the farther they are from you. Not only that but, if you go a long time without your glasses you start to get a pounding headache as your eyes try desperately to focus on things.
There is no way to help people without glasses know what it is like for people who have them, but I hope I potentially cleared some things up.
