Seeing things differently

I don’t have good distance vision, start losing detail a few feet from myself without corrective lenses. I can get by like that but don’t drive a car like that — I could if I didn’t need to read street name signs at all. I mean I can get around fine where I know everything, just can’t read at a distance and things get a bit fuzzy but are still recognizable. Corrective lenses just bring relief and readability. It’s more useful than that sounds, but that’s the basic truth of it.

My biggest need for corrective lenses is in stores. Bombarded with images of product is more than overwhelming. Send me to find something in a grocery store without having glasses on, for instance, and I might not find what I’m looking for, and I surely wouldn’t ask for help either (I’m just like that.) Simply having corrective lenses on in a store is a godsend.

I’ve been living for a few years with my old glasses, and finally had it yesterday when my toddler brought me my glasses he found on the table and they were in two pieces. They were my oldest glasses, the last ones with decent frames (not broken.) I had last had an eye exam some years before, not sure, in the 2000’s for sure though. At any rate I didn’t like my last prescription, so quit wearing the contacts after awhile and only wore the glasses at times when I desperately needed them. I then quit wearing them and pulled out a nice old pair of glasses from the 80’s that was a much simpler prescription and felt better to me, not quite strong enough, but that felt better than what my newer glasses felt like.

The past few years I’ve been using nothing or one of those two pairs of glasses. The frames on the newer ones broke on one side, I taped it up, but later the other side broke and I abandoned them for my eldest glasses thoroughly. Until yesterday, that is.

I haven’t gotten new glasses yet, have a prescription though. I am wearing a trial pair of contacts for a week. The doctor talked about maybe doing a mono-vision thing, but didn’t say he prescribed that, but now that I’m wearing them for awhile, I think he must have done such.

For me I want contacts for going out, shopping, outdoors, etc. I want them for watching movies, or just doing stuff in the house if I want to. I don’t want reading glasses, my own eyes read fine. My last contacts kept me from reading so much so that it’s the final straw I had about actually wearing those contacts and I endeavored to just get by with my own vision if I could, and maybe improve it if I could, but I didn’t find what I wanted to improve it per se, but feel I am not as bad off as before, that I learned to deal with it better, maybe that’s a better way to put it.

All in all, it’s a matter of I feel best without glasses on and need corrective lenses for being “out there” or else I sort of sink instead of swim. So I’m trying to be a swimmer and not be stuck in funky glasses that I don’t like on with my hair down, or wearing that outfit they look really stupid, that sort of thing. Freedom from presenting myself to the public with frames on if I so wish, but still wish to see something crisper than just the stuff right in front of my face.

Today is my big trial day since it’s the first full day with these contacts, and the sun is supposed to be shining, and it’ll be a nice day with a high later of about 70 degrees F. A very fine day for being outside. It rained yesterday, so my garden must be in want of a bit of attention and I’d be happy to do it and be able to see the other side of the yard, the birds in the trees over there, while not having to push up my glasses that keep slipping, or have to clean the pollen off the lenses … freedom within the boundaries of contacts is something I once loved and am giving a go about once again. I hope I can make sense of which eye is better for what since I am sure it’s not what I have ever had before (how the lense prescription is for me.)

I must recall my first experience with getting corrective lenses. I got glasses when I was 13 and my first remark outloud about them was “I didn’t know you could see the leaves on the trees!” It was a new world, not brown tree trunks with green tops, but individual leaves visible from a distance. Wow. That’s clarity for you. From wide to narrow. Fuzzy to crisp. Find Edges, found.