I don’t know why I get emotional (quietly) about my glasses and my eyes. Maybe because since I’m nearsighted, each year my prescription must be updated, and I can literally see (taking the glasses off) the world become blurrier within that week. Maybe it’s normal that your eyes so quickly rely on your glasses….less energy expended, right? Or just that it’s necessary….that your muscles weaken in order to adapt to the lens….I don’t really know…and somehow it’s an endless cycle of these muscles becoming weaker because they get used to the glasses, your vision becomes blurrier as a result, end up getting stronger glasses to correct the result, they become even weaker…..
Because my vision may have been degrading because my school never noticed until I turned 9, and my mother didn’t notice until I turned 10, but it was never this fast. It was never this fast. Every year? No way. There must have been some exponential increase of vision degradation after I got those damn glasses….
And now I always feel like I’m looking through a window. Even before I had glasses I hated how windows tinted the real world, and I’d want them open, so I could see the real trees, the real cars, feel the real air, see the real colors. I hated seeing these fake tinted trees. Like looking at a TV. I couldn’t really touch anything. But with the window open, anything was possible. I could run out to that house and run my fingers on that rough brick wall, I could go to that pole and feel the coolness of the metal, but with that window closed, all I could do was smudge that glass a bit and then I’d have to get some windex and clean it up….
Contacts sometimes helps dispel that illusion for me. I can forget sometimes. But most of the time, I feel the contacts irritating my eyes, I can always feel them. But sometimes, I see something and I become amazed at how clear it is or how close it is, or I touch it and I observe it and I feel some sense of wonder, and I remember that I’m wearing contacts and how clear they make everything, and I feel thankful and I shout a bit about how great contacts are. It happens when I’m living outside of my head, socializing being active, running around, looking at everything and yelling – when I forget the irritating sensation in my eyes. Sometimes I’m also reminded when I go to push my glasses up and am surprised when there’s nothing hanging on the bridge of my nose. It’s been a 10 year habit, after all. (I’m sure many of you are familiar with that sensation. It’s funny sometimes, a pleasant surprise, but as for the actual maneuver sometimes it’s annoying to me because I feel like people think I’m doing it on purpose or I’m unsure whether they understood what just happened xD I should get over that, eh).
The reason I started writing this anyway….I was laying down on the grass and took my glasses off. The clouds in sky were too bright, and I wanted my arm to rest on my eyes, so I took my glasses off. I looked up again to see if clouds were that much blurrier with my normal vision, since they’re really just formless blobs anyways. It didn’t look much different, I think. I compared it a while, moving the glasses to my eyes and away without wearing it, like it was a monocle, but was having trouble since if they’re not close enough, everything is small, like a digital camera’s screen, but if I want to see it close up, I’ll have to fold the arm in and it’ll end up blocking my vision, and be distracting. So I gave up, and ended up noticing the grass in my peripheral vision, which I’m always wondering about because in the end stages of glaucoma (which I’ll end up developing if I don’t get those drops at whatever age I’ll need it – I’ve known this since I was 10. [made getting my first pair of glasses more interesting]) you lose that first, without noticing. So I always wonder about that, probably needlessly.
Anyway, in my peripheral vision, I saw the grass swaying and flittering about. Focusing back to the front of me, I noticed a tall tree a little far away – it looked fuzzy, a little undefined, but I still saw it – and it’s leaves were swaying too. The tree looked like it was breathing. The grass was swaying, falling, rising, dancing….The tree was inhaling, exhaling, edging to the left, to the right, up and down, the leaves were falling up, they were falling down, breathing for the trees, branches the capillaries of the earth…everything was part of one system. Breathing. It was like everything was breathing. Calm and relaxing. I felt like everything was one thing, just swaying around a little, but still connected to the earth, staring up at the sky. Kind of floating around, like feathers. And I haven’t felt this way for a long time, and I’ve been searching for this cool, calm, nostalgic, happy and sad and blank feeling, just actively this week, but I’ve been really missing it. It’s why I was trying to avoid the computer this week actually. I wanted that feeling back, it wasn’t exactly the same, but it was close, it was getting there, and I blamed the distractions of this world for taking it away from me and my own lack of discipline. And yeah, it’s been part of the problem…
But when I put those glasses back on, I don’t feel like the earth is rotating anymore. And I don’t see the tree breathing. The leaves are moving. The grass is moving. The tree is still. And my world is limited to the contents of the frame. My peripheral vision doesn’t count anymore. It’s a foggy mess. My world is bound to that window. The tree isn’t connected to the grass to the left and right of me and it isn’t reaching towards the sky. It disappears past the plastic sticks containing the glass. It disappears and becomes some fuzzy mess that doesn’t count. It’s roots melt past what I can see and disappear into nothingness. The foundation of everything becomes nothingness, it’s invisible and it’s something I can’t reach.
When I take my glasses off – it’s all out of focus, but I can see how everything relates to one another and how everything connects, and my peripheral vision counts, and when there is something closer to me on the side than in front of me, it’s often paradoxically more clear. It wasn’t like that before, but because of that my eyes dart to it and I see how it seamlessly, effortlessly melds into the picture. With my glasses, there’s a frame that separates the real peripheral, and the artificial center of focus. What really matters becomes artificial, what I can’t consider is real.
I don’t why it makes me emotional (quietly!). It makes me so sad. It depresses me. And I’m worried that I can’t get LASIK because my eyes are too…unstable? They change every year, my left eye is developing an astigmatism which is bad enough since for some reason I was always happy that at least my eyes matched (that’s a weird reason to be happy…), and I’m probably developing glaucoma. They might reject me. And if I search for a doctor that will approve me, try to force it, suppose something does goes wrong and I lose my vision forever? I’d still have my hearing….that doesn’t mean much to me in comparison to vision (maybe obviously?). One example. You sometimes hear people say, “music is my life,” “I’d die without music.” They’d rather have their hearing instead of vision, I assume. Most of them are probably using those phrases as hyperbole. I like music, but music isn’t life – I probably wouldn’t have given a shit if my mp3 or music was confiscated. Big whoop, I still have books. (I’ve never been that music-obsessed person. I had to work for any musical taste. Books were effortless, music was more….something I had to research extensively, and I considered it more of a social thing growing up. Not so much anymore, but….) But take my books away and I’d become absolutely furious. If I can’t see, then I can’t read. There’s braille at least, thank god.
But yeah. If I lost my eyes….before I fully understood what glaucoma was I would close my eyes and imagine….I think people do this sometimes regardless…but I still do now sometimes, and with more significance I think. My world will inevitably become a hazy indistinguishable mess (if I can’t have my vision corrected). It won’t be shrouded in darkness – I will be able to see light, colors melded together, a tree will melt and be unrecognizable against the giant blue expanse behind it. Like a messy watercolor painting. But it will amount to the same thing. I shouldn’t worry so much, but my eyes are this bad at 20….every year I get new glasses a sinking terrifying feeling….that the world is so fuzzy now, that I’m losing it with each pair, that eventually I won’t be able to see my hands unless they’re touching my face. They’re already kind of blurry a few inches away….the lens of my glasses will be so thick, I wonder if eventually they’ll have to be custom made the way people with big feet need to call to have shoes made.
I should be thankful that I can see at all. Thankful for glasses. I wonder how people without access to glasses, or even just updated prescriptions, live. They might take it in stride even. That’s just life.
If that doctor hadn’t told me that not wearing glasses can make your eyes worse since the muscles become strained and weak, I’d probably walk around whenever I felt, except maybe when crossing streets. It contradicts my theory that wearing glasses weakens your eyes and it confuses me, but either way maybe I might as well.
Maybe I should just go and try to get LASIK. And see an eye specialist first about the glaucoma just so I’m fully informed, since the LASIK doctors will probably ask it of me anyway. I’ll need to get the money first. If it will help get rid of my feelings of disconnect with the world….I wonder why I feel like that….and why not wearing glasses makes everything feel that much more real to me. I can understand how to an extent it can, but not this much…that I feel peace and collected and weirdly nostalgically harmonious (unless I’m searching for something without someone helping, of course. then it’s just overwhelm, stress, irritation). I don’t think most glasses-wearing people feel that way (the disconnect wearing glasses, the stress I can guarantee they feel). Usually it’s just annoyance about trying to plop down in bed and the uncomfortable reminder to take your glasses off as they smoosh against your face, and getting hit by something and your glasses breaking or the nose pads bruising the bridge of your nose, people thinking you’re ignoring them because they pass you and the angle they appear in your vision (like, you’re sitting down, they’re up) is that so their face doesn’t appear within the lens, etc…I’ve developed some weird psychological issue with them. Issues…..
Tags: bad vision, disconnect, eyes, glasses, glaucoma, i hate glasses, lasik, life, myopia, nature, nearsightedness, nostalgia, peace, perspective, psychology, rant, sad, sadness, sort of, thankfulness, vision, windows
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