Glasses: A Loving Look at Vision Correction

I cannot fathom being without vision correction for any length of time in which I am not sleeping. My glasses are the first thing I put on in the morning and the last thing I take off at night.

I have had some sort of vision correction since I was two years old; that’s twenty-three years, which is a long time. I got bifocals when I was three, and I had those until I got contacts in seventh grade. I had contacts until my freshman year of college. I went on a trip to El Salvador that year and felt more comfortable with a sturdy pair of plastic frames than little flimsy contacts. I had those black plastic frames for four years. They served me well.

At that point, I wanted something more grown-up, but fun at the same time.

Versus 7058 in Color 1001

My current frames are Versus by Versace Model 7058. Sadly, Versus is phasing this design out; they are the coolest frames I’ve ever had. If you can’t tell from the picture, they have a silver bridge and half-rims in the front, and the earpieces are blue on the outside and bright green on the inside. The eyes go up a little on the edges, so they are almost like cat-eye frames, but way more subtle.

My eyes are progressively and steadily getting worse as I get older. My current lenses are three years old and I definitely need a new prescription. I fear, however, that I will have to get new frames to accommodate the thickness of any new lenses. Eventually I think I’ll have to give up on cute frames and succumb to old man plastic aviators, which look cute on old men and tiny hipster girls, but not on me.

Since I got glasses when I was so young, I literally do not remember not having them. Why would I? If I couldn’t see anything, what would I

My current glasses on my current head.

remember? Blurs? If that was the case, I could take a trip down memory lane just by removing my glasses and attempting to see farther than six inches.

Because of this, whenever I meet someone who has glasses, I observe their “glasses habits.” Do they take off their glasses to make a dramatic point? (Are they David Caruso?) Do they wear their glasses every time I see them? Do they make comments like, “Oh, I forgot to wear my glasses”?

It would be impossible for me to forget to wear my glasses. I wouldn’t be able to leave the house if my glasses suddenly broke or went missing. I wouldn’t be able to drive or read or type or watch TV or cook. I am dependent on these pieces of polycarbonate that sit on my nose. That is mildly worrisome.

However, and this is a big, important however, I have never, ever, in my entire twenty-three years of vision correction, broken or lost a pair of glasses. Even when I was a tiny toddler, I never sat on them, stepped on them, flung them across the room, or snapped them in half. Glasses and I have an understanding, I think. One of the first things I learned as a conscious human being was that I need them to live. If you depend on something so deeply, you will take care of it.

Right before I went on that El Salvador trip in 2004, I visited an optometrist in California where my parents live, in order to get my new, destruction-proof plastic glasses. I got my measurements taken and then I picked out the cheapest pair of frames he had in the store. He smiled somewhat patronizingly.

“You should get a back-up pair,” he said. “You know, just in case. We’ve all broken a pair of glasses, and you’ll be in a foreign country.”

It took me forty-five minutes to convince him that I wasn’t an idiot who would leave her glasses on the floor next to her bed, or on a window ledge, or on some train tracks. He didn’t seem to understand that I had been going to an ophthalmologist (the highest echelon of eye doctor) for sixteen years, and that I knew what I was talking about when it came to my eyes, glasses, and my ability to care for my vision. Don’t mess with me when it comes to my glasses.

I love my glasses, and I don’t mind wearing them because I’ve never really

I am three in this picture. And adorable.

been without them. I never got made fun of for having glasses, since no one remembered me before I had them. I was pretty lucky that way, and lucky that my parents were willing to shell out stupid amounts of money so I could see.

It is very likely that my future children will be born without eyeballs, akin to those eels that live in caves; my boyfriend has terrible eyes, I have terrible eyes, and terrible eyes generally run in families. But that’s okay: as a child who grew up with glasses, I think I know how to instill a loving respect for one’s glasses into others.