The Boy Who Could No Longer Wear Glasses
The Boy Who Could No Longer Wear Glasses
On the mystery of losing my ability to see.
I’m in college and waiting in line for rush tickets to Wicked. As we get closer to the box office, my friend Scott glances at the understudy board and delivers the bad news: “Idina Menzel is out today.” I squint and go “You can see that far?” And he goes “You can’t?! “
And that’s how I learned I needed glasses.
…Although I submit Wicked is the best show to see with blurry vision:
Dorothy + Wicked Witch + Defying Gravity = pretty much got it.
But like that green blurry blob Elphaba, something changed within me.
Something was most certainly not the same.
I started wearing glasses and my face finally made sense.
I have light features, blonde eyebrows, and pale eyelashes. When I’d look in the mirror, I’d find myself wanting. It wasn’t a matter of feeling myself, more like an inability to feel the “self.” A lack of cohesion or completion.
I had what my friend Ashley calls “Dave Matthews Disorder (DMD)” Think about it. Can you imagine his face? You can’t. It’s blurry, he’s blurry, his songs are blurry: “Candlight dudda in da street lie” Dave Matthews does not have gestalt and neither do I without glasses.
For me, glasses provided shape and definition. The edges of the frames spotlit my eyes. The color made me seem less pale. The shape contextualized my oval face as if to say “Yes! This is in fact a real face!”
The world treats you differently when you’ve got four eyes. Studies have shown that spectacle-wearers are perceived as more intelligent and trustworthy. Trial lawyers often put defendants in them for perceptual benefits:
“Glasses soften their appearance so that they don’t look capable of committing a crime. I’ve tried cases where there’s been a tremendous amount of evidence, but my client wore glasses and got acquitted. The glasses create a kind of unspoken nerd defense.” - Lawyer Harvey Slovis in NY Mag
This newfound cohesion pushed me into an archetypical box that had recently been created by Judd Apatow and hoodie-wearing tech entrepreneurs: “The cool nerd.” When the world’s sorting hat doesn’t know sort you, you don’t get sorted. I was happy to finally fit into a box.
And I leaned in hard. Glasses became a canvas to express myself. Face art, if you will. I even started taking photos of strangers wearing glasses who shared this frame.
This was all made possible by the good folks at Warby Parker who broke the monopoly and ushered in the era of glasses for the masses. I discovered there was a shop in Chinatown that would put frames in anything and I began shopping at thrift stores and vintages stores. At my height, I had over 30 pairs of prescription glasses.
And then one day I woke up, and I could no longer wear any of them.
Wanna Solve a Medical Mystery?
A few moments after putting them on, I’d get tension headaches and nausea.
I went back to the optometrist and got a new prescription. And a new one. And another. And another. And ANOTHER. Nothing took the discomfort away.
I went to a prestigious college of optometry and plead my case to the head of the department: “Wanna solve a medical mystery?” For a year, the doctor and a gaggle of assistants in N-95s took on the case with rigor. They put me through the full battery of tests. Visual Field. Corneal Thickness. Retinoscopy. OCT. Dilation. Prisms. Bi-Focals. Contacts.
And then they broke up with me. Some mysteries are not profitable enough to solve.
There was only one option left: I obviously had a brain tumor.
But an MRI revealed that my brain is unremarkable (Which is why I need to wear glasses!!!)
It got to the point where I was open to anything that might give me hope. I have a penchant for wanting to do things even more when I hit roadblocks. But I’ve always found that in order to do this, I need a cocktail of two stories:
To believe it’s possible. To really believe I’m not wasting my time.
A narrative that elevates the importance to the level of the sacred. A reason for doing it that transcends the facts of the situation. I call this a “Potion” because when I find it, it works instantaneously.
A relative introduced me to a world class medical intuitive which is not only a thing, but a thing with hierarchy! (Ever met an average medical intuitive? I think they call them ‘nurse practitioners.’)
My world class medical intuitive told me to turn off all electricity near me while she scanned my eyes from 100 miles away. She then proceeded to draw the issue:
Apparently my right optic nerve is 2mm shorter which is the perfect psychic answer because it’s both plausible and unverifiable. She told me to take some supplements and do some eye exercises.
This all happened during the pandemic. I couldn’t handle any additional weirdness, so I bought a bunch of fake glasses to wear on zoom. Don’t judge, you used the beauty filter, I used some non-functional acetate to make my face make sense.
But now that we’re back in the world, I tried wearing dummy lenses out in the world, but I just feel so … dumb.
And now I’m faced with the dilemma that befalls all of us when things don’t go our way.
Is there more meaning in letting this go or trying harder?
Where’s the potion?
Losing Well
We’re all going to lose some of the abilities and attributes we hold dearly. It’s part of the deal. And in general, I think learning to get better at losing with dignity is one of the most important skills we can all cultivate right now. Sometimes I feel like getting a sneak preview is instructive and maybe even lucky. A little pain for the future gain of inner peace.
I once went to a spiritual experience where the facilitator had an eye patch and admitted she couldn’t really see anyone after a botched lasik surgery but that she’s come to believe it was fate because she’s “Supposed to learn to see in a different way.” She did have a fairly powerful “third eye,” but she also broke several tchotchkes during the ceremony.
In my glasses sabbatical, I have cured myself of Dave Matthews Disorder. I make enough sense to myself and I’m a little closer to not caring about physical aesthetics. It’s increasingly clear that the internal game of sense-making is so much more important.
…But I’ve lost more than just my face canvas and I haven’t been acknowledging it.
I’ve lost the ability to see subtitles, sit in the mezzanine, or see signs in the dark. I don’t experience the nuance of micro-expression if someone is sitting far from me in a room. It feels a little less alive. I’ve turned inward in the last few years and I sometimes wonder if this has anything to do with it. If on some level, it makes the world around me feel a little less worth taking in. ‘Sight’ and ‘Vision’ are among the most powerfully linked double-meanings in the English Language. And both meanings resonate: I’ve been getting by seeing only what’s right in front of me. And as a new Dad in a moment of technological, cultural, and economic change, the future has never felt blurrier.
After four years, nine optometrists, a department head, and prestigious psychic, most people would probably give up and get lasik. I’m strangely terrified of eye surgery, but maybe finding the potion for that is a better use of my creative energy.
I still keep an emergency pair of glasses for situations where I have to drive at night or God forbid, sit in the mezzanine. I pop them on for minutes at a time until my head feels like it’s going to explode. My prescription expired recently and I went to my 10th optometrist and he gave me the mildest lenses yet. And I can wear them for 20 minutes at a time! I noticed that if I do this every day, that my tolerance slightly improves. He told me that I probably qualify for vision therapy which I was hoping means they do “e-stim” on your eyeballs, but it really just means accountability for doing eye exercises. My world class medical intuitive may have earned her title.
The doctor said it’s possible that my eyes have forgotten how to collaborate together to see what’s in the distance and that I might have to train myself to be able to do that again.
And that’s exactly the potion I needed to keep trying.
