If these were medieval times, I would be an outcast. I might live in a hospital with the ill, the immobile, and the blind. I might simply be cast from society, forced to live on the outskirts of town, and all because I can’t see very well. People would probably see me as a weak link, maybe even a fraud simply pretending not to see (Maldonado, 36-38).

​

Thankfully, eyeglasses have not only been invented, but they’ve evolved. Since their invention in the 1200s, glasses have gone from primitive handmade leather hoops without arms to an industry all their own. They’ve passed through styles, from Benjamin Franklin’s bifocals to scissor spectacles and lorgnettes, lenses which folded out from a handheld device that could be held up to the face for men and women who didn’t want to wear glasses, including George Washington. Women in the 1800s didn’t want to be associated with the elderly or infirm by wearing glasses, but in the 1900s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis helped make large lenses fashionable (“Timeline,” n.p.). But as I walk along the sidewalk, avoiding the eye contact of passersby and prodding my slipping glasses back up the bridge of my nose, I wonder how much of society has changed with them. I wonder how much of an outcast I am, even today.

​

I’ve failed the eye exam every year for ten years, growing less and less accurate each time I take it, and yet I’m still embarrassed every time. When my mom accompanied me to the optometrist she and I giggled as I incorrectly read every letter on the chart across from me.

 

“How in the world did you think that P looked like a W?” Mom exclaimed, imperceptible and faceless from all the way on the other side of the office, and I laughed while the doctor patiently observed.

 

“You have beautiful eyes,” the doctor remarked, drawing yet another machine over my face. Doctors always said that. “Better A or better B?” he asked, giving me the option between two sets of lenses. I chose B for Brie, because they both looked exactly the same: blurry.

​

I go to the eye doctor once a year for a new prescription, and every year it turns out that my vision has gotten worse. The power of the lens in my left eye is -5.75, and in my right it’s -6.5. The negative sign means that I’m extremely nearsighted, and the magnitude of the number means that I require a lot of correction in order to sharpen my vision (Segre, n.p.). In other words, I can read a book without a corrective lens so long as I hold it less than 5 inches from my face.

​

Without my glasses, I can see my boyfriend Alex’s face from one foot away – very blurry, but it’s there. From one foot, the stubble on his chin is just a blur without texture, he doesn’t have spaces between his teeth, or pupils for that matter. From two feet away, the contours of his nose begin to disappear, his eyes become dark shadows, and his mouth starts to fade. At four feet, his nose and eyebrows are gone completely. One more step back and his ears disappear, then another and the shadows of his eyes are gone. Ten feet back and his entire face is a flesh-colored blur, and the edges of where his body meets the wall behind him blend. From ten feet away I become very sad, because without help I can’t see the things I love anymore.

​

In the four years we’ve been together, Alex has never complimented my eyes. He says that I’m beautiful and cute, sure, but mostly he calls me intelligent, hard-working, a good person. Amazing. But I’ve always been grateful that he doesn’t dwell on my eyes the way others have. It’s a cheap shot, a surface-level observation. It’s like complimenting the first thing you notice about someone when you’ve just met them. Those people don’t know that the beautiful eyes don’t work.

​

“You have beautiful eyes,” said the man in front of my cash register at work. He wore ripped jeans with grass stains on both knees, a white shirt with smudges of black grease and dirt. When he asked me out, I told him no, pretending to be sorry that I had a boyfriend.

​

Older women especially tend to say it, taking my hand in the soft warmth of their liver-spotted, veiny grasp. “My, what beautiful eyes you have! Absolutely gorgeous!” And I smile politely, thanking them and wondering what other small talk I’ll have to endure.

​

But Alex never has. Even I am guilty of admiring his eyes from the passenger seat, telling him how beautiful they look. His left hand maneuvered the wheel while his right rested on the gear shift by his side, blue eyes illuminated by sunlight, fixed on the highway. He gave a small smile, letting his eyes flick toward me for a moment before returning to the road. Usually when I say this he doesn’t reply, but sometimes he says that mine are prettier.  

​

One day I asked him, “Why don’t you ever tell me my eyes are beautiful?” I wasn’t fishing for a compliment – I really wanted to know.

​

“Because everyone else says it to you and I feel like they’re much more than that,” he replied.

​

“Oh,” I couldn’t help but smile. “Well, how would you describe them then? The color, I mean.”

​

“They’re like baby blue, deep sea…” He trailed off with a sigh, trying to find the right words. “They’re I’m-in-love-with-you blue.”

​

I think he was just trying to shut me up.  Either way, that's a blue I can live with. I should count my blessings that others find beauty on the surface of a failing organ. I don’t remember my eyes ever being beautiful while wearing my glasses.

​

“Do you prefer the way I look with glasses or without?” I wrote in a text message to him. “Be honest.”

​

I watched as the moving ellipses immediately appeared on my phone screen, not much time needed to think before he began to type: “Without.”

​

Each morning I wake up and make the decision whether to put my contacts in, to feel the shock of the cold lens against my naked eyeball and experience the inevitable dryness and discomfort after a long day, or to keep my glasses on. I almost always choose the former. Contacts are confidence; I have a better day when I leave my glasses at home on the bathroom counter. Glasses are for when I’m tired, for late nights and early mornings when everyone always looks their worst anyways, for when I have strep throat and feeling better is far more important than feeling confident. Glasses are what you keep next to your bed, so that when you wake up in the middle of the night and need to see, your extra set of eyes are within reach.

​

When I choose the contacts, I can wear the crappiest clothes I own and still feel fine. I can smile at strangers and make polite conversation with the cashier at Walgreens when he asks me my weekend plans. I can put on makeup to emphasize the blue of my eyes. The world looks the same when I wear glasses as when I wear contacts, but it doesn’t feel the same. It’s the difference between having the window up in the car or rolling it down to feel the breeze.

​

I should be used to it, I know; I’ve had four eyes since I was ten years old. I got them because I failed a test – the school-administered eye exam. It was a periodic exam, one we were required to participate in yearly along with the hearing and lice tests. Unlike with the eye exams, I could relax for the lice checks; it was more of a scalp massage than a test, during which a nurse with blue latex gloves gently parted my hair with toothpicks to check for bugs. And while the other kids seemed excited for the opportunity to be excused from class to take the eye exam, I was always nervous over having to perform well, and for what the consequences would be if I didn’t.

​

I don’t remember noticing that anything was wrong with my vision. My eyesight depreciated slowly, to the point where I didn’t notice it going away until I was simply told that it was gone. On the day of the test, half of the school library was sectioned off for vision testing. Bored looking strangers manned tables of clunky machinery. They didn’t wear blue scrubs or white coats, but normal things that made them look like they could be someone’s parents – sweaters and skirts and khaki pants with scuffed brown shoes and tired ties dangling. When it came my turn, I sat across the table from a woman with a monotone voice and black, tightly curled hair down to her shoulders. The woman wore dark lipstick and smelled like perfume. She told me to put my face up to the machine, an ominous looking black box. Inside of it was a list of letters projected amidst what appeared to me to be a black, endless void; it was a castle of letters crowned by a large E and growing smaller toward the bottom, and it was my job to traverse it without missing a step. I read the letters aloud to her, squinting when need be and making up the answer when I wasn’t certain whether I was looking at a T or an F. When I was finished I drew back from the machine. She pursed her dark red lips as she scribbled on a paper and told me I’d done well.

​

Later that week, my mom told me that I’d failed the eye exam and took me to an optometrist, who outfitted me with a pair of glasses. It happened as quickly as that. And when I tried on my new glasses and looked out the window of the storefront towards the grove of trees on the other side of the street, I realized with awe that the world didn’t look at all like I thought it did. Now the world had details and intricacies; the grass had texture and the leaves on the trees moved individually, not just as a mass in the wind.

​

“Wow…Look at the grass…” I muttered. This made my mom and the doctor laugh, and I grew embarrassed. They knew what grass looked like. I was the one with the defective eyes.

           

My mom and I picked out my first pair of glasses without dwelling on the style. They were dark blue and wiry with oval-shaped lenses. I figured out their arms could bend in either direction without breaking, but my mom told me I wasn’t supposed to do that. They came with a pair of shaded lenses that I could clip on top of my glasses to turn them into sunglasses, but those made me look like Ozzy Osbourne, and I only used them once to shield against the setting sun as I rode my bike alongside the lake.

           

“How come you didn’t tell me you couldn’t see?” my mom would ask me, to which I always shrugged. I hadn’t known I couldn’t see. Why should I have suspected that the world was any different from what it looked like?

           

When I returned home wearing my new glasses, my brother took one look at me. “Four eyes,” he said with a smirk. I didn’t let it bother me, seeing it as a fulfillment of his brotherly duties. It was a cheap shot, an unoriginal insult spat out by hundreds of television bullies. Yet I was nervous about going to school the next day and how my classmates would respond. I was going to be the only one in my class with glasses. Would they call me four eyes? Would they think I was a nerd? Chuckie in Rugrats and Dexter in Dexter’s Laboratory proved that the vision-impaired of the cartoon world were shy, weak, maybe a little antisocial, and usually very smart. But even looking smart, I knew, might not be a good thing.

           

As it turned out, my classmates were pretty indifferent about the change. I got a few compliments even, surprised to experience none of the name-calling I’d seen in the cartoons. In the real world, nothing is as dramatic as it is on television. I thought I’d gotten off easy. What I didn’t guess is that wearing glasses would impact me like it did the nerdy cartoon versions of me, the ones who were the butt of the joke, who talked with nasally voices or stuffy noses and seemed to belong only in the outskirts.

​

A little over a year later, I was halfway through my second pair of glasses, wiry and dark blue like the first pair but with a slightly squared frame. I watched Steve Urkel on the television tugging on his suspenders, making a fool of himself, putting one finger in the air when he had something smart to say. When Mia finally became a princess in The Princess Diaries, the first things to go even before her unibrow and frizzy hair were her glasses.

​

It was at this time that my mom decided she’d trust me with contacts. I promised to be responsible, to take them out every night before bed and be sure to put them in clean solution. My parents both wore contacts, but if I hadn’t lived with them I wouldn’t have known; I only ever got to see them in glasses on occasional late night or early morning glimpses. They looked better without them, I thought, like completely different people from their bespectacled selves. I figured the same applied to me. I was in middle school now and wanted to join the world of adults too, so that nobody would ever have to know that at only eleven years old, my eyesight had already gotten worse than that of both my parents’. At only eleven years old, I was joining the elderly and infirm.

​

The nurse waited patiently as I tried fitting the lens to my eye for the first time, my face less than two inches from the surface of the mirror, clumsily fumbling with the contact atop my right index finger as my left hand held my eye open. I tried it the way I’d seen my parents do it, using one hand and holding the eyelid open with one finger while placing the lens with another, but again and again I let my eyelid slip closed. The muscles in my eyelid twitched on reflex to protect my eye. My body opposed the concept of contact lenses entirely.

​

When I finally achieved success I looked around. The contacts were uncomfortable. I couldn’t feel them, exactly, but if I squished my eyelids tightly shut I could hear them clicking around, trying to find the right spot to sit. My eyes felt instantly drier, somehow.

​

“My, you have beautiful eyes,” The nurse remarked. “How do they feel?”

​

I answered with an enthusiastic nod.

​

I’ve been nodding enthusiastically ever since. I was nodding when my sister, mom and best friend gathered to help me pick my third pair of glasses, a maroon-purple hybrid with thick rims that fit the style of the other high school girls. I was nodding the summer before college when my mom and the sales assistant agreed that glasses in question, light brown and wireless on the bottom, would really “accentuate my beautiful eyes.” Didn’t I know what beautiful eyes I had? I nodded.

           

And I did know. The trouble was they didn’t feel beautiful, not when I surrendered my contacts to the doctor, sat in his high-backed black chair, and faced the inevitable failure of trying to read the chart of letters on the wall opposite. Not when I had my glasses on, windows up. No breeze.

​

The thing is, my failing eyes makes me one of the majority, one of an estimated 3/4 of the United States population that is visually impaired (“Vision Impact,” n.p.). The other 1/4 of the population is probably the group of people wearing glasses with fake lenses, basketball players like LeBron James and Kevin Durant who playfully argue over who gets credit for starting the trend (Cacciola, n.p.). That part of the population has the luxury of knowing that glasses are a choice, not a necessity. And if LeBron James can wear huge, plastic lenses without feeling weak, shouldn’t I?       

​

“You have beautiful eyes,” the doctor told me. People always say that. I faced the chart, knowing that I would fail but feeling nervous anyways.

​

 

 

 

Works Cited

Cacciola, Scott, and Ben Cohen. “Fashion Plates of the NBA Make Specs of

Themselves.” The Wall Street Journal. N.p., 14 June 2012. Web. 30 Mar. 2015.

Maldonado, Tomas. “Taking Eyeglasses Seriously.” Design Issues 17.4 (2001):

32-43. JSTOR. Web. 30 Mar. 2015.

Segre, Liz. “How To Read Your Contact Lens Prescription.” Understanding

Your Contact Lens Prescription. Ed. Dr. Gary Heiting. All About Vision, n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2015.

“Timeline of Eyeglasses.” Museum of Vision. The Foundation of the

American Academy of Ophthalmology, n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2015.

“Vision Impact Institute Releases Study on Corrective Lens Wearers in the

U.S.” How Many People in the U.S. Wear Glasses? Essilor, n.d. Wb. 09 Mar. 2015.