stunningly bad takes on glasses: a retrospective
I've worn glasses since I was eight years old. It should've been seven but I was a creatively sneaky little so-and-so with a BFF accomplice (may all the world's pantheon rest her soul). Back then I was terrified of being made fun of, because that was What People Did in books and movies and The Brady Bunch. What I didn't realize was that all those things persisted in media because it was adults writing it, and that was the world they'd grown up in, not the one I was a kid in. I got exactly one jeer, which for me was a vast underperformance, and I took it for what it was. (Organized bullying didn't hit until sophomore year, and even then it wasn't about the glasses.) For the most part, glasses turned out to be just a fact of life for people in general. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised at just how many batshit things I've heard about them over the decades.
"Are you sure you want polycarbonate?" This was the one that started it all. My dad insisted we get it, so that nobody, least of all klutzy little me, could break my lenses. Kaiser looked at me and my mom with concern and said, "It's REALLY expensive, are you sure? This is for a kid after all." And she said "Yes, it's for a kid. They break glasses. We don't want that."
Fast forward to ten-ish years ago when I realized polycarbonate was now the standard material. Made me smile.
"Don't you want LASIK?" During and just after college, I got this so often I stopped answering and just took my glasses off so people could see the Roman-nosed androgyny that is my unadorned face. Amazingly, about half of them insisted I looked better. I assure you: unless I am wearing a full face of makeup, I do not.
I don't find glasses fiddly, annoying, inconvenient, or any of those things that drugstore-reader come-latelys try to convince me of. I feel about them the way wheelchair users feel about their chairs: they let me live my life. Also I'm squicked out by the idea of eye surgery, to the point that I couldn't actually look a friend in the naked eye for a week after his LASIK. (I liked the idea of radial keratotomy better TBH, as it didn't remove any tissue.) But to hear it from a small yet motivated minority of patients with permanent complications, I made the right choice.
"You should always pick the smallest frames you can." I don't know about other folks, but I like peripheral vision. When I said this to the optician who'd handed out the above gem, she responded with something like "This is a really heavy prescription, you should get the lenses as small as you can stand so it doesn't hurt your face." I laughed in hers, because where was she when the only kids' frames were either wire (not allowed to get them, "they'd just get all bent") or training for that classic librarian look? And it is NOT a heavy prescription. I can get around familiar and predictable places on foot without glasses. Can't read all the signs, can read maps. I'm not on the level of someone who can't see soap on the shower floor from bent-over distance away. I'll take my more-flattering, slightly heavier visual field expanders, thanks. And related:
"Opticians hate working with plastic frames, you shouldn't get them." Dropped by a (white, male) fellow customer as the (Black, female) optician was working with my (white, female) new plastic frames. After he had refused to ask her his "fairly technical" question and decided to wait for the (Asian, male) lens tech in the back to be able to come answer him. I said nobody had ever told me that plastic frames were worse to work with. He said something like "they are though, and they're just inferior in general." I, looking around at multiple walls full of plastic frames for sale, responded that I trusted the people selling the frames and adjusting them every day to know how to do it properly. The optician handed over my glasses. They were perfect. As I was thanking her, the tech came out of the back. The guy's question was the same one I'd asked the optician before he walked up, and the tech gave the same answer she had. Her expression, when I caught her eye, said "Every damn day" and I responded with what I hoped was a "Sorry you have to deal with this."
"You should get progressives as soon as possible because you're going to love them once you get used to them." Ah. No. See above re: peripheral vision and how much I like it. I also like not having to telegraph to others that I'm looking in their direction, which with progressives is nigh impossible to swing. The trapezoiding was making me seasick and finding the right distance for everything was making my neck hurt, and it didn't get any better over the week. And some people take a MONTH to get used to this shit? No thank you. It's not urgent enough yet to be better than using my no-glasses state as a zoom lens. Especially if I can't or shouldn't use the frames that this same person said were "really very becoming," because apparently the LensCrafters folks should never have let me try progressives in the dreaded plastic frames. (Too prone to slippage.) When I finally do get to the point where switching between using and not using glasses is actually a measurable nuisance, I'm going to try old-fashioned bifocals.
