I’ve worn glasses since the third grade. After I complained that the chalkboard was blurry, my parents knew my vision was failing and shipped me off to the eye doctor who outfitted me with a clunky pair of wire frames that looked absurd on my 8-year-old face. From then on, my parents cheerfully referred to our family as the ‘Three Blind Mice.” I’ve gone through numerous pairs of glasses since then, to accommodate my growing body and worsening eyesight, but the absolute best were my red-framed Adidas pair with spirally arms from grade 8, and wine-coloured Burberry frames with pyramid studs, which shattered when my friend accidentally stepped on them.
Glasses are my badge of distinction. They are the way I see the world, and also the way the world sees me. I feel naked without the weight of a bridge resting on my nose. At this moment, I am a person who consciously chooses to not engage with other people’s ideas of how I should look. But for the first decade of my bespectacled life, I felt like glasses were a shield that hid my true face. I felt much prettier without glasses, and agreeing to put them on every morning was like signing a contract that guaranteed me a lifetime membership in the Ugly Duckling club.
As early as I could in high school, I rushed off to get contact lenses so I could finally have my very own Rachael Leigh Cook in She’s All That moment. The optometrist offered me a tester pair, but every time my finger with the lens got anywhere near my eye, I instinctively blinked. My eyes refused to be tampered with. I am allergic to being pretty. The doctor encouraged me to try putting them in at home. I nodded my head and never took the contacts out of their case, relegating them to the unknown depths of my childhood bedroom, or else the garbage can. With contacts out of the question and the price of laser eye surgery prohibitive, I turned to wearing frameless glasses in the hopes nobody would notice the corrective lenses sitting on my face.
In the time since then, I’ve come to embrace my disability, even playing it up with thick black plastic frames and vintage cat-eye frames. So you can imagine I felt a little…apprehensive when I was asked to test-drive a pair of ACUVUE contact lenses. People say you should ‘try new things’ but I tend to stay curled up in my hard shell exoskeleton. I have a comfort zone and I stay well within it. It’s why I don’t really travel, and will probably never stop wearing Doc Martens. But I guess your early twenties are a time for ‘experimenting’ and somehow my idea of experimentation involves being picked up in a town car and driven to Yorkville for an eye appointment so I can figure out if contact lenses are liberating or not.
I was worried it would be a harrowing experience with a terrifying doctor jabbing my eyes while the Psycho soundtrack played in the background. But instead, I found myself listening to soft strains of classical music in Dr. Barbara Caffery’s office, while we chatted about my steep eyeballs and how much we both love magazines. After measuring my eyes and determining the kind of lenses I needed, she asked me honestly whether I really wanted to do this. I took a deep breath and said ‘yes.’ She came back into the room with some testers, told me to relax and look up, and after about three tries, managed to gently place the filmy lenses on my eyeballs. Success.
I was sent out to the waiting room for a few minutes to let the lenses “settle,” and felt strange and floaty. I found I could actually read the news ticker scrolling across the waiting room TV, and caught a glimpse of myself in some reflective glass. For the first time in my life, I could actually see what I look like without glasses, and it was jarring and unfamiliar. Too much face! I barely recognized myself.
About two weeks later, a small cardboard box arrived in the mail and I had to walk all the way to the FedEx Depot at Sherbourne and Lakeshore to retrieve it. It sat on my desk for weeks until today, when I finally decided to open the box and make a halfhearted attempt to stick the goobery plastic in my eye, for the sake of writing this piece. But… I couldn’t do it. I hate the idea of touching my own eyeballs, and without the gentle coaxing of a friendly eye doctor, I gave up without even really trying. I truly wish I could be the sort of hot-dogging adventurous gal who tries new things just for the hell of it, but once I fail at something, I never try again. I bury that failure like it’s a deceased pet in the backyard and never speak of it again. After failing my driver’s license twice, I gave up and decided to live in a city. Failure is painful, and I don’t like subjecting myself to it. But fear of failure and not trying can make you a failure too. I dislike being so young and already set in my ways, but my desire to chameleon into someone else’s standards of conventional attractiveness are long gone. I don’t play sports, or go to the beach, or do anything where contact lenses would be beneficial. My glasses are simply me, futzy and unchanging, and that’s all there is.
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Isabel Slone is a Toronto-based fashion blogger and writer. Follow her on Twitter at @isabelslone.
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