Unseen Stupidity

Turns out I’ve been wearing my lenses the wrong way round. For five years. Without having a clue. WHUT?! Yes. I’m that person. Whoops.

Last Friday I broke my glasses. You know, the type of much-hated goggles that you only resort to when too tired to wear contacts, too drunk to keep those little shells on your eyeballs or too lazy to get up off the couch and venture into the world? That’s me and glasses. I don’t like the way I look with glasses on, no matter how often I’m told differently – so I’ve treated them HORRENDOUSLY for the past 5 years that I had this pair.

They usually lived on the table OR in my handbag, without a case. Just thrown in there. Which was very noticeable from the fact that the glass was scratched so severely that it was a wonder I could even still see through them. But they were used. Mostly for Netflixing purposes. And this handbag is where they met their unfortunate demise, because upon returning home after my softball match, I fished not one but two pieces out of the handbag. Broken. Unfixable. Inconvenient.

I’d been meaning to get new ones for months now (mostly because it’d been 5 years since I last had my eyes measured as well), but never got around to it. Until now – because watching Netflix with contacts in is just plain insane (underlined by the fact that I’ve now created a picnic perch right in front of the tv so that I can still watch it without glasses. Not ideal lemme tell ya.)

So Tuesday took me to the optician for a long overdue measurement session AND not one, but two pairs of new glasses (which sadly will take at least another picnic-perch-week to be made). And to NEW DISCOVERIES AND WISDOM!
(Who woulda thunk that a store filled with glasses could shed clarity on life, eh? Eh? There has to be a pun in there!)

Turns out – 5 years of me telling myself I’d probably be blind at my next measuring was a lie. My vision had not changed in the slightest. It had actually remained stable for the entire 5 years. -2,00 on the left side. -2,25 on the right side. OOPS.
Because as much as my eyes remaining stable had come as a victory – that line of knowledge came as a shock. Me and my boggled brain, apparently, had decided to wear my contacts the wrong way around for these past 5 years in the assumption that my left eye was worse (-2,25) and the right eye better (-2,00). We’re trained to believe that left is always worse. By Zelda (the left going paths were always a doozy). By our boobs (the right one is usually biggest). By the simple meaning of the word (to be left is worse than to be right).

I spent the past 5 years assuming I was doing something to help myself. While actually making things worse. Because wearing the wrong contacts could have caused (in part, I was told) the dry eyes, the not being able to keep them in for long periods of time, the headaches (damn, it wasn’t the wine, hoorah!) the fuzzy vision and the very sticky eyelids in the mornings. And I had just taken those things as parts of the contact-wearing life in the full assumption that clear vision would be totally worth it. I thought I was making myself better – while I was actually making myself worse.

And that holds true for a lot of behavioral patterns I KNOW I’ve adopted in life that are not necessarily what the doctor would prescribe. I’ve had enough personal-effectiveness-trainings that pointed out destructive behaviors (like using self-mocking humor as a shield for vulnerability. Or using hypersexuality as a means of not making real connections. Or substituting feelings with food and the like) to know that it’s better to do what the ‘doctors’ tell ya (or kind and loving friends), instead of trying and figuring it out for yourself.

But how can we know what we don’t know? How do we see what we don’t know is there to be spotted?

It sure makes a girl wonder…what else am I already doing that’s secretly bad for me – that I don’t yet know?!

Maybe my new glasses will help me see (that) clearer!