As some of you may already know, I got new glasses just this weekend. I’d needed a new pair probably for three years, but it finally happened- we were able to (sort of) afford to get me not one, but two pairs of glasses. I now have one regular pair of glasses and one prescription sunglass, since I’m always struggling to deal with bright lights due to my migraines.
Today’s post is going to be pretty brief, but getting my glasses was such an important thing to me, the memories I have of getting them feel like they go on for hours. See, I’ve needed glasses since I was about five or six years old. I was teased a lot as a child because of it, getting the usual nickname of ‘four eyes’ which, by the way, totally confused the pants off me. But the name calling wasn’t even the most annoying part about having glasses as a kid…
It was how often I broke them.
I wasn’t a notably active child. Sure, I ran around the schoolyard with the boys making mud bombs and playing a game of chase, but otherwise, I didn’t really do much in the way of exercising. I spent a majority of my time playing video games or watching TV. But somehow, in my childhood, I broke my glasses a lot- once a year was the bare minimum. What’s weird is, they almost always broke in the same way:
The lenses just kind of… fell out.
When lenses fall out of a frame, it’s not as easy to fix them as if a nose piece comes off. What was weird is it was almost like clockwork: I’d be on the line waiting to get on the bus home from school, and it’d fall out while I was just sitting there. Every. Single. Time.
Of course, I broke my glasses other ways too. I sat on them, stepped on them- pretty much any way you can break a set of glasses, I’ve done it a number of times throughout my twenty plus years of needing them to see straight. And to me, what sucked wasn’t the wearing glasses part: it was getting an exam each year and dreading the eye drops to dilate my pupils… mostly just because they were eye drops.
What’s funny this time though is that, after so long going without a change in glasses, I forgot one important thing: your eyes need time to get used to them. The moment I put my pair of new lenses over my eyes, I started to feel dizzy because everything looked… rounded and weird. It was like I was in a fun house, and I had to be reminded how normal that was, especially when you go so long without a change when you need one. I spent three days with my eyes feeling like everything was out of sorts: things were slanted where they shouldn’t be, as if the world was on tilt, and everything was randomly too big or small to make sense out of.
Still, the glasses do work better than my old ones. I found that out just in the waiting room at the ophthalmologist’s office, where I could read a poster from across the room that I couldn’t read at all with my old pair. Let’s just hope I don’t break these ones, as I managed not to my last ones. After all… I can’t afford a new pair anytime soon with the two I got this time around!
Do you use glasses or contacts? I’d love to hear some of your experiences with corrective lenses! Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. I hope it’ll be as fun for you as it was for me to share!
Heh, I remember when I was needing some as a kid. I wanted them and lied bout what I could see during the exam. The doctor told my mom I had something really wrong, but my mom talked to me and I behaved. XD
I actually don’t mind glasses, kinda like them honestly.
I’ve had it where the lense popped out. I usually was able to fix it, either by myself (if I still had the screw) or going to the eye place to get it fixed. It usually happened either at school or work. Twice at work. The one time I was able to fix it by screwing the screw back in with a box cutter. XD
I’ve gotta say, I’ve never heard of someone lying about their eyesight to make sure they’d get glasses… That’s a pretty interesting story! Why did you want them so bad?