I’ve always thought people with glasses looked so much cooler and smarter than I could ever imagine being. I idolized people who could rock big bold glasses. I’d never had vision problems, which of course is ideal, but I always wanted what I couldn’t have. I know I wasn’t alone in this – I even had a friend in high school who popped out the lenses of our free 3D glasses from the movie theater to make them work for him. I probably would have too if I wasn’t so painfully insecure and worried that they would draw attention to me and that someone would call me out for wearing glasses without lenses.
As I got older, I mostly got over it. I’d still glance a little too long at someone with really cool glasses, but beyond that, I mostly didn’t care. Maybe I started to realize that everyone I knew was paying thousands of dollars to get laser eye surgery and should just be thankful that I didn’t have that added expense?
However, right when I started to appreciate my perfect vision, I started to notice I was having some troubles driving home at night. I was living in Alberta at the time and when you live in northern Alberta short days in the winter are just a constant reality. You can’t avoid “driving at night” because so much of the day is dark. My drive into work at 7:30am would be pitch black and when I left work at 4:30pm it essentially looked like it was midnight. You truly have never seen someone as pasty as an Albertan between the months of December to February. It would get to the point where I wondered if the blue light from my cell phone was my best hope for getting a tan or if I was becoming a vampire.
With all this dark “late night” driving at 7:30am and 4:30pm, I started to notice that I was straining my eyes to see things in the distance and was just generally struggling more than I ever had before. I hadn’t gotten my eyes checked in over a decade because I’d never had a reason to go before, but I decided I needed to just finally book an eye exam.
As the day of my eye exam finally arrived, I was feeling pretty desperate. The drive home after work was starting to get down-right scary. I have always been a pretty crappy driver, but this was getting out of control. Not to mention I had to drive down some particularly scary unlit rural roads that could easily be subbed into any scary movie in the last decade. As I was getting ready to leave work and head to my appointment my co-worker Nick approached me,“Hey Lisa, I just wanted to let you know, I was driving in front of you the last couple of days home from work and I noticed that both your headlights of your car have burnt out.”
That’s right- BOTH of my headlights were out of commission. AND I HADN’T EVEN NOTICED!
I was obviously embarrassed, but I can’t say I was overly surprised. I know absolutely nothing about cars and tend to be generally unobservant about how they work. So of course I assumed it was something wrong with me rather than the car to explain my sudden poor vision. It hadn’t even occurred to me to check my car lights. I thanked him for the information and assured him that I would get them fixed, but I figured since I had an eye appointment, I might as well keep it.
When I arrived at the appointment the optometrist asked me, “So why are you here?”
“Because my headlights are burnt out?”
Silence. Followed by a rather awkward explanation from me and some intense judgement from her. Ultimately she concluded that I should get an eye exam anyways because it had been so long since I had one.
At the end of the consultation she confirmed, “You need to get your headlights fixed.”
It turns out my vision was still pretty excellent.
She did say I had a very very slight astigmatism and gave me a laughable prescription that kind of seemed like a way for her to get me to buy glasses from her-which is absolutely what I did. I bought myself some very cool glasses and wore those glasses (that essentially did nothing to help my vision) almost every damn day and felt like the smartest girl driving without headlights in Alberta.
lisa prose 