Eyeballs

I recently got contact lenses, for the first time in 34 years, as someone who has required corrective eyewear since the age of 6.

I have attributed the decision mostly to my ongoing midlife/existential crisis — as a way to prove to myself that I’m NOT set in my ways and I CAN do new things — and for whatever reason I had increasingly been thinking that my eyeglasses are my whole personality and I was interested in experimenting with a different look.

Some other, more peripheral but still valid reasons for why I decided to try contact lenses in middle age include, in no particular order:

• Sometimes I feel like a nerd at the beach wearing thick glasses
• My glasses slip down my sweaty face when I’m doing athletics
• If I wear a cap, the corners of the brim compete with the corners of my eyeglasses frames for space, so i can either have my glasses squarely on my face, or my cap squarely on my crown, but never both (yes, life is hard)
• If I want to wear sunglasses, I have to wear prescription sunglasses, which involves a complicated switch and the need to carry a bag to store whichever eyewear is not on my face, and I’ve always wanted to do the thing where you casually flip your sunglasses onto the top of your head when you temporarily go from the sunny outdoors to the indoors, like when walking on a boardwalk and then going into an ice cream shop
• My glasses fog up when i’m eating hot noodle soup, which can interfere with the overall dining experience, both due to the temporary lack of vision and also because I just picture myself looking like Marcie from Peanuts and feel a bit vulnerable

The reasons why I had not tried them before were the same ones lots of diehard glasses-wearers don’t: seemed like a hassle, didn’t like the idea of touching my eyeballs, didn’t like the idea of dry eyes, thought my face looked better with glasses, etc.

The eye doctor who did my contacts exam (who knew there was a different exam for contacts? Not me) was a tall Korean guy who looked like a K-pop singer¹. I asked him a lot of questions about contacts and thankfully he didn’t seem to think it was weird that I was getting contacts for the first time, unlike the front office staff, who repeatedly kept assuming that I had already been wearing contacts for years and also entered my birth year in the system as 1994 instead of 1984, which I had to correct. Unintentional acts of micro-ageism, I guess.

Anyway, I didn’t realize I had to make an additional appointment for a contacts fitting, and that apparently it could take an hour or more to put them in for the first time. Honestly, that was the most surprising part of the whole thing for me (as well as seeing the cost of contact lenses without a vision plan). How hard could it be?

Well… it wasn’t exactly the eye scene from A Clockwork Orange, but it also wasn’t a quick dab-dab quickly followed by perfect vision either. It took me a good 5 or 6 tries to get the first one in. (Embarrassingly, I couldn’t keep my eyelids open, which sounds like an obvious mechanical blocker to getting a contact lens onto my eyeball but at least my reflexes are healthy, I guess.) I also kept having intrusive thoughts about how an eyeball is just a bag of water floating around in a skull socket, which did not help.

The associate at the eye shop² was very encouraging and kept saying “You got this!”, which was kind, because I clearly did not got this. Eventually I did get them in, and was even able to keep them in for a few hours that first afternoon.

So, I now have the option of wearing contact lenses. I wear them about once or twice a week, for less than a full day at a time and usually only when doing the aforementioned activities including bike riding and hot noodle eating. Honestly, it’s… fine. Not earth shattering or anything, but it is nice to have the choice, even if I don’t use it very often.

(I wore my contacts to a New York Liberty basketball game a couple months ago, and on one particular play the referee declined to call a foul on one of the visiting players despite what the crowd felt was an obvious hit, and somebody yelled out “1-800-CONTACTS!!!” which made me laugh. The hecklers at women’s basketball games are refreshingly nontoxic.)

• Health
• Midlife
• Slice of Life