…as a bat

"And the next one?"
I paused. "Erm….?"
The woman made encouraging noises to me. "The next shape? Can you tell me what it is?"
I wrinkled up my nose. "Er… I don’t know."

I was seven years old. Sitting in the medical room at my Primary School, more commonly used by our school nurse to pour what felt like neat bleach on grazed knees. For today only, appropriated by a woman to do eye tests. A woman who was now frowning thoughtfully at me. It’s only in retrospect that I realise the test was specifically designed for the younger years of Primary School, and that’s why it had symbols on it, rather than letters. There were rows of small black line pictures on a yellow background, which we looked at through some kind of contraption not massively dissimilar to a microscope. The first few pictures were easy: a house, a dog, a boy… that kind of thing. Once the pictures got smaller, though, my recognition faltered.

"A frying pan?" I wasn’t really aware of why I didn’t know the answer (and as a serious-eyed precocious seven year old, I was completely non-plussed by the unfamiliar sensation of not knowing the answer…) I just knew it wasn’t very clear to me. I don’t even remember registering that it was because the picture was ‘fuzzy’. I just remember a silence which was obviously meaningful, and being packed off home with a letter in my satchel for my parents.

That weekend, we went to Dolland and Aitchison, where an earnest woman with long frizzy hair, and a slow solemn voice tested my eyesight, and told my mother that it seemed I was a bit short-sighted.
"Not enough to wear glasses… but come back if it gets any worse."
And thus it began.

I am hopelessly short-sighted. Ludicrously so. I wear either glasses or contact lenses every single day. I leave my glasses by the side of the bed, and they are the first thing I reach for in the morning, and the last thing I take off at night. The net result of this is that I often forget how shoddy my sight really is, and am still occasionally breathtaken by how blurry and crappy the world is when I’m not wearing them. Glasses-less, anything I want to be able to see has to be right up by my face. I realised with a jolt recently that I should put some spare contact lenses in my handbag, for the rather sad reason that if I were to break my glasses for any reason…. I probably wouldn’t be able to get myself home. I wouldn’t be able to read road signs, and I’m terrible at finding my way round at the best of times.

It wasn’t always this bad. When I first got glasses (cloudy blue-grey frames, royal-blue case) they were optional. If I forgot to bring them into assembly, I could still just about see the overhead projector words to sing along with the song for that day ("Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning….."). If I left the glasses at home, I could still muddle my way through a lesson where I had to copy stuff off the blackboard. Wearing glasses was almost quite glamorous. It seemed exciting. It was a way to get attention, surely the crack cocaine of the under tens: undivided attention from your parents.

Things changed as I got older, and my eyesight deteriorated. In my teens, wearing glasses seemed like a crime against humanity, a crippling disability of limitless scope and causing unimaginable pain. A disfiguring scar that was sure to leave me destined to live alone, to die alone, and more specifically to never, ever, EVER ever get a boyfriend. One particularly melodramatic morning in a music lesson, during an argument, my friend of the time turned on me scathingly and said, "At least I don’t have to wear glasses." If I am completely honest, I was simultaneously devastated and delighted. Devastated at what was a needlessly cutting remark. I was so comprehensively cut to the quick that I burst into tears instantaneously. This confirmed everything I had though about my glasses. They were ugly. I was ugly. Everyone pitied me, when they weren’t mocking me…

But a little tiny bit of me also recognised that a line had been crossed. I was now in that rare place where the comment my friend had made was so outrageous, and so beyond the pale, that not only was I comprehensively in the right, I had carte blanche to react in whatever way I wanted…. and no one would dare to say that I should act differently! I weighed up these options in a split-second, and decided to follow up on my bursting into tears by rushing out of the room in proper adolescent fashion.

My glasses have been through some strange times with me. They have been abandoned for weeks at a time when I got contact lenses, then suddenly welcomed back into the fold when I got conjunctivitis. They were once ‘lost’ in my room in halls: I put them down, and had no idea where on earth they were. And, of course, without my glasses on, I could neither see where they were, or find my contact lenses. I resorted to going down the corridor to rather pathetically knock on a new friend’s door, "Er… I have a favour to ask?" Claire was bemused, but sympathetic. I felt very foolish when she pointed out my glasses, which were (to her) in full view in the middle of my bed. To me, glasses with thin, dark frames, on a dark bedspread… they may as well have been invisible. Even my poor contact lenses haven’t been treated as well as they perhaps should have been. They have been left in egg-cups of water at parties, and once one was dropped on a grassy verge where it lay on the soil for fifteen minutes before my mother seized upon it triumphantly.

But I realised recently that my attitude towards my glasses has changed recently. Perhaps it’s a side-effect of getting older. Perhaps its a kind of acceptance as I move away from my rather adolescent obsession with trying to look good. Perhaps its additional confidence. (Perhaps it’s the fact that I finally spent far too much money on a new pair of frames, which I am temporarily rather enamoured of) Who knows.

All I do know is that I now feel comfortable in them. And I don’t feel that how I look is massively changed by them. Obviously I look a bit different. But fundamentally, it’s still the same me, whether I have them on or not. And that’s a nice place to be.

With love,
speccy-four-eyes (AKA therumtumtugger)
xxx