Needing Glasses

First Sign

While waiting for the bus one day, William looked across the road and saw that the sign for the chip shop opposite was blurry. In his many years waiting at this bus stop, he had always been able to see everything on the sign clearly, from the winking cartoon fish to the grinning buck-toothed chips next to it. Now that fish was a blue blur, while the chips had congealed into a mound of mashed potatoes.

First Sign (?)

When looking back, he realised that this was obviously not the first sign, but rather the first sign that he had happened to notice. Your eyesight didn’t just become blurry in an instant, or a single moment. It happened by progression. There had obviously been other signs in the past, but they had just escaped his attention. Unless, that is, something could only be defined a sign if it had been seen by at least one person. He’d probably have to read Wittgenstein or Derrida or something to know for sure.

First Impression

William was an excessive worrier. He had never been diagnosed with it, but imagined that he probably had anxiety of some sort. Or, at the very least, he was on the anxiety spectrum. Having a headache that lasted more than two days signalled a brain tumour; accidentally consuming half a glass of spoiled milk would lead to irreparable intestinal damage; slight stiffness in his hand after a night of playing computer games was the beginning of arthritis.

     As he looked at the blurred fish-and-chip shop sign, the anxiety kicked into action again. It told him that the blurriness was indicative of retinal damage that would ultimately result in him going blind unless he had eye surgery.

     He could not think of a worse part of the body to have surgery on than the eye. You got a single hair on it and you were in discomfort, an accidental rub with the fingertip was agonising, so how would it feel to have a needle or a scalpel running across it? Even taking into account the anaesthetic they’d undoubtedly give you, it was a terrifying thought.

Second Impression

While he did worry a lot, he was at least able to calm himself down eventually. He knew that if he had actual anxiety, he wouldn’t be able to do this. The way it usually went down was that he would worry intensely about something stupid for five or so minutes, and then his common sense would step in and reassure him. This happened again as he told himself that he probably wouldn’t need surgery. Eye surgery was risky and doctors didn’t really like to do it. Only serious conditions required eye surgery, and this probably wasn’t serious. It was probably just that he needed glasses.

Flashback

One day, when William was either eight or nine, he was looking at a picture of his father that hung in the living room. He had seen the picture before, but had never examined it closely. When he did so, he noticed that his father (who was either a teenager or in his early twenties) wasn’t wearing glasses. This struck William as odd, because he’d always known his father as a glasses-wearer, and had just assumed that he’d always worn them. It had never occurred to him that there might be a time when he didn’t.

     Later on, he spoke to his father about it:

     ‘I started wearing glasses when I was twenty-one I think,’ his father had said. ‘Maybe twenty-two. I think I might actually have been wearing them when that picture was taken, but I took them off because I didn’t really like having my picture taking wearing my glasses. But no, I haven’t always worn them.’

Third Impression

This flashback coincided with the arrival of the bus. While William was getting on it, he knew that the flashback had confirmed it: he was in his early twenties now, just like his dad had been. From what he understood, when the need to wear glasses was not caused by eyestrain or as a complication of another medical condition (e.g., diabetes) it tended to be hereditary.

     He had nothing to worry about. He was not ill. His eyes were not damaged. He just needed glasses.

His Local Opticians

Due to their adverts and famous slogan, Specsavers was the first opticians that he thought of going to. Thinking this made him think about advertising, and how it was the most annoying, obnoxious kind of adverts that were the most effective at creating awareness for the product they were selling. (And not, as he had always assumed, the result of advertisers trying and failing to be funny or cool.)

     This was especially the case with products or services which people weren’t familiar with. For example, he didn’t really use price comparison sites. If he ever needed to, though, he would visit Go Compare. Their adverts were both annoying and unfunny, but if they had been really tame and banal, he probably wouldn’t have remembered them. It was really quite clever if you thought about it. There were probably tons of price comparison sites out there, but the first (and perhaps only) one you ever thought of was Go Compare. This would not have been the case without the adverts.

     Specsavers, too, had their adverts. Their tagline – “should’ve gone to Specsavers” – had made it into the public consciousness and was pretty much a saying by now. Again, there were probably tons of different opticians around, but the only one he could think of was Specsavers.

     He would have to check and see if they had a branch near him. If not, he’d find out what other opticians there were.

The Rest of that Day

All day at work, he looked around to see what he could and couldn’t see. He looked at the far corner of the room, where Kathy sat. All he could make out of her was the shape and colour of her hair; her face was indistinct. When it came to Lisa, who sat a few seats to Kathy’s left, the blurriness was minimal. So minimal that if he hadn’t been looking for it, he wouldn’t have noticed it. Whereas Kathy was so blurred that he was surprised he hadn’t noticed it before.

His Local Opticians (2)

Was Boots, the Internet informed him. The nearest Specsavers was forty minutes away, while Boots was only ten. He would go on Saturday to get an appointment.

Appointment

When he went to Boots, the receptionist gave him an appointment for the next Saturday at twelve.

Why He Didn’t Want to Wear Glasses (1)

Ever since the conversation with his father (see ‘Flashback’), he had worried that he would have to wear glasses himself one day.

     His first reason for not wanting to wear glasses was that of vanity. It was not so much that wearing glasses would make him look ugly, but that they would make him look uglier. He knew that there were some people who could pull off glasses, but also knew that he wasn’t one of these people.

Thoughts on Boots Opticians

It had seemed weird to him that Boots was also an optician, like when he saw that Co-Op did funerals, or when Virgin used to have perfume shops or made Cola.

Next Saturday

With its trays of numbered lenses, pictures of letters arranged in cone-shapes, diagrams of the eye, and various other ophthalmological paraphernalia, the optician’s office looked like a torture chamber from an existential film.

     The optician – who didn’t wear glasses herself – asked William various health-related questions, a surprising amount of them not about his eyes. After this, she turned off the light and asked William to lie back on the chair. A large machine then descended in front of William’s face. It placed lenses in front of his eyes, which William looked through to try and make out letters on a chart on the opposite wall. While the lenses were changed, the optician read out pairs of numbers, and asked which one of these numbers better enabled Will to see the chart opposite. Sometimes, the answer was obvious. At other times, he could barely distinguish between the two. When this happened, he was reluctant to answer. Obviously, one of the two numbers was better, even if he couldn’t see it himself. He didn’t want to say a number, and have it be wrong. To give a prescription, all the optician had to go on was what he told her, and if he told her the wrong things then he would get the wrong prescription. He wouldn’t be able to use the glasses, and would have to come back and have another eye test. He’d probably also have to pay for the first prescription, because once they had your prescription on file they made you glasses from them and they couldn’t just give those glasses to someone else if they didn’t work for you.

     He knew that all of this was probably unlikely, and that the optician had years of experience and knew what she was doing. But that’s the whole thing about anxiety – it doesn’t listen to reason. That’s why it’s an illness in the first place. When you’re almost hit by a car and spend the next twenty minutes breathing heavily and shaking, no one calls it anxiety. It’s a natural reaction to a stressful event. Anxiety’s game was fabricating stressful situations, or magnifying things that were only minimally concerning.

     After a few more pairs of numbers, the machine ascended back to the ceiling and the optician turned the lights on. Going over to a draw, she removed a generic pair of glasses and asked William to test them. William tried it on and saw that he could see perfectly now. The optician asked him to read the letters on the chart opposite, and he could read them all, even the letters at the bottom.

     ‘Great,’ the optician said. ‘This’ll be your prescription, then. Now if you go back out front, Jennifer will help you choose the glasses you want to put them in.’

The Glasses (1)

Jennifer from reception, who had also made his appointment earlier in the week, walked him around the shop. She showed him various frames, which he modelled for himself in front of a thin, tall mirror. Due to his innate prejudice against glasses (see ‘Why He Didn’t Want to Wear Glasses (1)’), he knew that there was no pair she could show him that he would like. With this in mind, he selected the glasses not on the basis of which one he liked, but which one he hated the least. In the end, he chose a £50 pair, which had a black frame and made him look like a caricature nerd.

     ‘They look really good on you,’ Jennifer told him.

     ‘Thanks,’ he said, although he imagined that saying ‘they look really good on you’ was something she said to everyone. She might even have been professionally obliged to say it. At the very least, she wouldn’t be able to say, ‘actually, I think they make you look like shit’, even if they did.

     After paying at the till, she told him that the glasses, with his prescription lenses, would arrive in seven to ten days.

Contact Lenses and Laser Surgery

There were alternatives to glasses, both of which he had considered in the build up to the appointment. Both these alternatives would also solve the vanity issue (See ‘Why He Didn’t Want to Wear Glasses (1)’), leaving his eyes naked. But this was where their benefits ended.

     Contact lenses required that he insert something literally onto his eyeball. The fact that millions of people used them every day attested to the fact that doing so wasn’t dangerous, but he didn’t like the idea of touching his eye, even indirectly (see ‘First Impression’).

     It was the same with the surgery. He was sure that laser surgery was perfectly safe, and that the risks involved were minimal, but he didn’t want to risk it. His reasoning was that if there was even a one percent chance of the surgery going wrong, then that was one percent too many, and one percent more than the zero percent chance associated with not having it.

7-10 Days

The rest of the week passed normally. All in all, it was a pretty unremarkable week which blended in with the series of other unremarkable weeks that made up his life. The only significant thing about it was, he realised, that it was the last week that he would ever spend without wearing glasses. No more afterwards would he walk down the street, or go to work, without wearing them. For the rest of his life, he would be a guy who wore glasses.

     Considering that this was his last week, he tried as much as possible to see what he could and couldn’t see with his naked eye. When on the bus, he looked at billboards and buses in the distance to see if they were visible; at work he continued to people-spot; when ordering food at lunchtime he scanned the menu for what was illegible like others were doing to see what conflicted with their diet.

     He went to the regular Boots and bought some glasses lens cleaners. When doing so, he thought again about it being weird that Boots was also an opticians (see ‘Thoughts on Boots Opticians’).

     By the ninth day of waiting, he expected that his glasses would come on the tenth: the tail-end of their expected arrival time. At other times, he worried that they would not come at all, owing to a mix-up of some sort, and he would now have to wait a further 7-10 days for his glasses to come.

     At about twelve o’clock, Boots called him and said that his glasses were ready for collection. Hiding his surprise (and relief) he thanked the receptionist, who wasn’t Jennifer this time.

     After work, he went to Boots to pick up his glasses. The optician came out and adjusted the glasses so that the frames fitted his head. She then asked William to look around the room to see if they worked. William looked at an advertisement poster on the front of the reception desk, which he could read clearly, all the way down to the legal smallprint at the bottom. He pulled the glasses down, and while his eyes could make out the two women frozen in laughter on the poster, and the company logo at the top, everything else was indistinguishable.

     ‘They’re really great,’ he said, ‘it’s like having a new set of eyes.’

     ‘They’ll take a little while to get used to,’ the optician said, ‘and you might want to be careful on a day like today because it’s so bright. But in a week or so, it’ll be just like you always wore glasses.’

     A few minutes later, he left the opticians. Once outside, he looked at all the shops across the road, whose names and cartoon mascots he could make out perfectly. He could even see people’s faces and facial expressions.

The Glasses (2)

Although it may have been partly due to politeness, everyone he spoke to said that they liked the glasses. Mostly they stuck to ‘they really suit you’, which always made him wonder if they were saying that this own eyes, without glasses, didn’t suit him.           

     ‘They look really great on you,’ Lisa said. When she said this, he was really flattered. Knowing what Lisa was like as a person, he knew that she wouldn’t hand out insincere compliments.

     For the first time, when he saw himself in the mirror he felt good.

Why He Didn’t Want to Wear Glasses (2)

It took him awhile, but he eventually got used to wearing the glasses. And, after everyone’s compliments (see ‘The Glasses (2)’), he realised that his worry about them making him look bad (see ‘Why He Didn’t Want to Wear the Glasses (1)’) was unfounded.  

     But there was still one concern that he couldn’t get rid of. When he was younger, he used to visit his grandmother every week. She was healthy for her age, and didn’t have any serious ailments. What she did have, though, was a whole roster of pills that she needed to take every day in order to remain healthy. Even one day without the pills and she would become seriously ill. Every time he went over to her house, he saw her tray of pills. As a child, the thought of this used to terrify him. It wasn’t so much the pills themselves, but what they represented. Specifically, the fact that his grandmother would rely on these for the rest of her life. If she wanted to go out for the day, she would have to take them with her and make sure that they didn’t get lost. She could take them for a thousand days without fail, but on the first day she forgot to do so she would become seriously ill.

     While his anxiety was ongoing, and he could become anxious over anything (See ‘First Impression’), this specific worry had been with him for most of his life. Now, with his glasses, he had his own concern. Like the pills, needing glasses was not really a serious thing. He had impaired vision, but his eyes were healthy apart from that. There were loads of people who needed glasses – it wasn’t a problem. But that didn’t change the fact that, for the rest of his life, he would have to wear them. Then there would come a time where it wouldn’t be billboards or shop signs across the road that he would have to worry about not seeing, but everything. He wouldn’t be able to see the products in the shops, or books in the bookstore, without his glasses. It wouldn’t even be about distance anymore – he would just basically be partially blind when not wearing his glasses. If he lost his glasses, or dropped them on the floor and stepped on them, he wouldn’t be able to see until he found them.

     It was nothing to worry about, of course. He knew that it was nothing.

     But, then again, that wasn’t how anxiety worked.