This past Monday I got corrective eye surgery. I have never been a candidate for LASIK, for a multitude of reasons, so for the longest time I thought I was doomed to spend the rest of my life encumbered with glasses or contact lenses. Enter EVO-ICL, fresh off the FDA’s approval list and promoted by no less scintillating a celebrity spokesperson as Joe Jonas. I was chatting with someone at a wedding recently who had just gotten this, and something about it felt so right, as if the universe had prepared this specially for me. I went in for a consult the very next week, and the pieces fell into place after that as if by predestination. Dr. Sharpe is an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon of no little repute, having appeared or at least been mentioned on radio a few times. His bedside manner, so to speak, is incredible. He gives you his personal cell phone number to text with any questions you may have between the consult and the procedure, and you almost can’t wait to go under his knife. The procedure takes 10 minutes tops, and you barely feel anything at all, except for some pressure and some sensations inside your eyeballs that nothing can prepare you for. The bright light overhead reminds you of what it must feel like to be abducted and operated on by aliens, if the aliens were constantly telling you what they were going to do next and what a good job you were doing. When I walked out of the operating room, my dad couldn’t even tell looking at me that I’d had something done to my eyes. As for me, I felt like I was emerging from the womb and seeing the world through a brand new set of eyes for the first time. Even now I have trouble grasping the magnitude of what has happened.
When pressed, I could come up with any number of reasons why I thought glasses and contacts were a nuisance, but at the end of the day I think my decision was largely based on aesthetic reasons — as was my decision to wear contacts in the first place eleven years ago. It goes back to a middle school-era association I have of glasses with nerds — the uncool kids, the kids who were always bullied and made fun of. I think all my life I’ve tried to run from the shadow of that association, even though I’ve never been a victim of it myself in any life-changing way.
People who stumble into nearsightedness as adults tend to have a different view of glasses from those of us who have been bound by them since childhood. They might see a pair of glasses as a mere accessory rather than a thing encumbered with so much significance. The weight of a pair of glasses on our nose far exceeds the weight of the material comprising them.
These views are, of course, my own. I don’t claim to speak for everyone who has grown up wearing glasses. I don’t condone using “nerd” as a pejorative label or othering kids who don’t conform to our idea of what is cool or deserving of our admiration. I just can’t escape these associations that I formed so long ago. Maybe I never found the right pair of glasses for me, as some of my friends have suggested — glasses-wearing friends who embody none of the stereotypes I’m so afraid of projecting when I leave home.
At any rate, I don’t have to worry about leaving home in glasses anymore. I don’t know if I’ll actually evince any of the qualities that I’ll doubtless feel pouring out of me as I go out into the world: confidence, attractiveness, importance. If anyone asks, I have no dearth of practical reasons to justify getting this procedure. No more contact lens-induced headaches, no more worrying about sleeping over at someone else’s home if I’m wearing contacts, no more having to choose between blindness and destroying a perfectly good pair of contacts when I go swimming, no more waking up on camping trips where I decided to sleep in contacts with a blistering headache.
When I was five and got my first pair of glasses, I was so excited, because I felt like a grown-up, like Mom and Dad. I wasn’t used to wearing glasses back then. Sometimes I’d have them on my nose and forget that I was wearing them. When my neighbor once said something about my glasses while talking to my mom right after I’d gotten them, I looked at her askance. How did she know I’d gotten glasses? Forgetting that they were on my nose the whole time. Now I have the opposite experience of waking up in the morning and reaching for my glasses on my bedside table, even though I can see perfectly well without them — better, even. A curious inverted symmetry.
When pressed, I could come up with any number of reasons why I thought glasses and contacts were a nuisance, but at the end of the day I think my decision was largely based on aesthetic reasons — as was my decision to wear contacts in the first place eleven years ago. It goes back to a middle school-era association I have of glasses with nerds — the uncool kids, the kids who were always bullied and made fun of. I think all my life I’ve tried to run from the shadow of that association, even though I’ve never been a victim of it myself in any life-changing way.
People who stumble into nearsightedness as adults tend to have a different view of glasses from those of us who have been bound by them since childhood. They might see a pair of glasses as a mere accessory rather than a thing encumbered with so much significance. The weight of a pair of glasses on our nose far exceeds the weight of the material comprising them.
These views are, of course, my own. I don’t claim to speak for everyone who has grown up wearing glasses. I don’t condone using “nerd” as a pejorative label or othering kids who don’t conform to our idea of what is cool or deserving of our admiration. I just can’t escape these associations that I formed so long ago. Maybe I never found the right pair of glasses for me, as some of my friends have suggested — glasses-wearing friends who embody none of the stereotypes I’m so afraid of projecting when I leave home.
At any rate, I don’t have to worry about leaving home in glasses anymore. I don’t know if I’ll actually evince any of the qualities that I’ll doubtless feel pouring out of me as I go out into the world: confidence, attractiveness, importance. If anyone asks, I have no dearth of practical reasons to justify getting this procedure. No more contact lens-induced headaches, no more worrying about sleeping over at someone else’s home if I’m wearing contacts, no more having to choose between blindness and destroying a perfectly good pair of contacts when I go swimming, no more waking up on camping trips where I decided to sleep in contacts with a blistering headache.
When I was five and got my first pair of glasses, I was so excited, because I felt like a grown-up, like Mom and Dad. I wasn’t used to wearing glasses back then. Sometimes I’d have them on my nose and forget that I was wearing them. When my neighbor once said something about my glasses while talking to my mom right after I’d gotten them, I looked at her askance. How did she know I’d gotten glasses? Forgetting that they were on my nose the whole time. Now I have the opposite experience of waking up in the morning and reaching for my glasses on my bedside table, even though I can see perfectly well without them — better, even. A curious inverted symmetry.
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