Mick Jagger, you said it best. “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”
I don’t think he meant the bifocals that I had to buy for my birthday gift to myself, which is not actually what I wanted for my annual “treat-pour-moi,” but I can see clearly now it is what I needed to do.
It’s my own fault. I gave in. I booked the optometry appointment knowing full well the outcome. I admitted defeat. I could no longer see the computer screen without squinting. I couldn’t read without magnifying glasses. I couldn’t decipher labels on bottles, nor follow ingredients listed on the box. My old glasses (and I do mean old) just didn’t cut it any more. It was time to admit that I couldn’t see well. Sigh.
Most people wouldn’t see that as an issue, but most people didn’t have Roy Orbison glasses in grade 2. I did. I looked like the geeky crooner (for the record, I adore Roy’s music) and thus, was treated like a freak by my grade school peers. That is probably why, at the tender age of 5, I sat on the dark plastic frames until I heard the glorious crack of twisted armbands. Gosh, did I break those? Oh, I’m sorry (smirk).
I’ve been wearing glasses since the age of 2 because I had what is commonly known as lazy eye. I don’t much care for that name. My eye was not lazy; it was bored. Everyone else had perfectly straight eyeballs. I wanted to be different. In preschool I could spin one eyeball around my socket like some creature in a horror movie. I found it amusing. I guess nobody else did, so my early days as a child freak were off to a banner start. Two corrective surgeries later, my lazy eye was told to straighten up. My one rebellious feature was foiled from the beginning.
It got worse in grade school when that ridiculous Sally Jesse Raphael hit the television screen in her hideous ruby red peepers; frames so big you could eat your lunch on one half of the frame, and only fashionable until about 40 minutes after their return-policy expired. Naturally, I had to have those. They went perfectly well with my Dorothy Hamill haircut and my tiny facial frame. I looked like Big Bird in red glasses. It’s a wonder they didn’t stone me at recess.
A series of fashion frames followed, and by the time I reached university, I realized that the consensus on glasses was actually positive. I was no longer a geek in goggles; I was an intelligent young woman who looked super smart in her copper, metallic frames. Smart girls ruled. Oh, whatever.
Good vision health care is important, so I swallowed my frame phobia and admitted to my optometrist that I couldn’t see straight, ahem. My solution was bifocals.
There is nothing sexy about bifocals. They come with a warning. Everything is wobbly, if you move your head too fast or look up or down too quickly you’ll hit the floor. Whose idea was that? Now I’m a spectacle in my spectacles, dizzy and nauseous, and frankly, a threat to anyone and anything in my blurred peripheral vision. This is going to take some getting used too.
Alas, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. At least now I can behold it.