ILLUSTRATION BY DOLA SUN
In second grade, I got my first pair of eyeglasses to correct my substantial nearsightedness. They were a novelty for several months—a year even. Eventually, though, I decided I hated them.
I didn’t want to be “Judi four eyes.” I already thought I was strange looking, with hair that wouldn’t feather the way Farrah Fawcett’s did. I grudgingly wore my glasses at school when the teacher wrote on the chalkboard, but I stashed them in my desk as often as I could. When I went places, say shopping at the Covington JCPenney with my mom or walking with my older sisters to get a banana split at Grandpa’s Ice Cream in Ft. Wright, I always “accidentally” left them at home. It wasn’t that bad walking around in a fuzzy world, I rationalized.
It did get a little dicey when doing gymnastics, especially when it was time to vault. I would stand at the end of the vault runway and stare at the blurry expanse before me. I knew the vault was there, even if it was a vague brown blob 75 feet away. During competitions, I could usually make out the gymnastics judge raising their arm in the air to indicate I could start. I’d lift my own arm in the air to salute back and take off running. Unsurprisingly, vault was my worst event.
When I was around 12, it was decided that I was mature enough for contacts. Turns out that being able to see the beat-up brown leather horse at the other end of the runway didn’t improve my vaulting all that much. Apparently, I wasn’t great at running with all my might toward a solid object, even if it was one I could see crystal clear.
But vault aside, getting contacts revolutionized my preteen life. On the Saturday morning the optician first showed me how to put a contact lens into my eye, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of intense clarity. Everything around me was suddenly bright and sharp, as if it glistened with dew. Being able to tease out the subtle striped pattern on the blue carpet in the optometrist’s office made me feel almost dizzy.
This world of straight lines and crisp letters was available to me in a new way. No pair of geeky-looking plastic glasses stood between me and its edges. All I had to do was open my eyes, and clarity was mine.
That was 37 years ago, and I’ve worn contacts ever since. It’s been tedious at times, constantly buying contact solution and continually reordering boxes of lenses. Not to mention that my eyes have gotten drier (thanks, menopause!) and springtime pollen and late-summer ragweed do a number on them.
I often swap my contacts for glasses by midafternoon, especially if I’ve spent the morning on a long run and sweat has poured into my eyes for hours. Still, I’m grateful that this feat of medical engineering first conceived by Leonardo DaVinci 500 years ago and perfected just decades before I was born has allowed me easy access to the world at large, from vault runways to stop signs to my children’s faces.
But now, inevitably, the farsighted fog of middle age has arrived, the long-awaited counterpart to my prepubescent, nearsighted haze. Or put a less graceful way: When it comes to what’s directly in front of me, I just can’t see shit anymore.
It started with struggling to see text messages on my phone, expiration dates on packages, and charging ports of computers in dim rooms. I bought reading glasses, enlarged the font on my phone, turned on lights, and started holding things I needed to see just a bit farther away.
But after a few years, I’ve fully arrived at a place where there is no longer any ideal distance for anything. I am perpetually too close or too far. The screens of my life—the screens that are my life, as a writer—taunt me with their dancing black words as my close-up vision becomes worse.
To be clear, I am a sighted person experiencing the normal range of vision issues. It’s not a disability, and complaining about it feels small and ungrateful. But is that a g, a p, or a q I just typed in the word ungrateful? A u or an o? Is the r even there? Am I the only one who sets Word at 300 percent?
I suppose I would just like to make something of this farsighted bookend to my lifetime of nearsightedness. If you’ve read my column long enough, or probably even just once, you know that I’ve got to make something out of everything that happens, especially in midlife; the title of my column is a bit of a giveaway. I’m a person who relies on metaphor to frame situations and who especially—like, especially—loves a lesson that involves an unexpected comparison.
But how to find what I’m looking for? It has occurred to me to crack open some poetry, because the poets know how to grab things from the air and set them on the page. But who has time for the poets when you have a headache from eye strain?
That’s why I decided to ask ChatGPT. Do you know you can ask it anything? I requested that it write a short essay about why it’s frustrating to be nearsighted when you’re young and then farsighted when you get older. The piece it returned to me was quite dramatic. “The emotional impact of this vision shift cannot be underestimated,” my chatbot wrote. “It’s a constant reminder of the passage of time and one’s mortality, a tangible sign that youth is giving way to the inevitable march of age.”
That was more existential than I expected from generative AI. Then again, it’s learned from the internet, which is full of everything about humanity, including our collective angst and lots of books OpenAI has probably illegally scanned.
Still, my gut says that my current frustration with my eyes isn’t about the passage of time. I do write about the passage of time. Often. You might even say it’s my thing. But as I think back to that young girl who used to stand at the end of the runway and just start running, trusting the vault was there, I don’t think, Oh, how I miss that girl. Instead, I think, Age has made me better, smarter, and happier. I just watched the movie Nyad, for crying out loud! I’ve been leaning hard into age-positivity these past few years, and I’m ready to make my turning 50 later this year a battle cry.
As I stare at my fuzzy screen, trying to bring it into focus, I recall that intense moment of clarity all those years ago when I first got contact lenses. It isn’t the youth I crave. It’s the clarity.
In fact, if someone asked me right now what I want most, that’s exactly what I would say: clarity. Because it feels like I can never actually see the situation I’m staring directly at, especially when it comes to parenting my teenage children. It’s the definition of blurry, like holding a plastic container with a recycling symbol I absolutely cannot discern no matter how I twist it to catch the light. It’s cloudiness and darkness 90 percent of the time.
At least once a day I say some version of, “If I could have just seen X, I would have Y”—usually in response to one of my kids doing something stupid that I’m sure is my fault because of poor parenting. (Facebook usually confirms this supposition.)
I’m used to squinting into the distance, to needing help to see its edges. But to constantly be questioning what’s right in front of me is new.
The future always felt like an exciting mystery, one I was sure I could tackle with my corrected 20/20 eyes. Now the present feels like a cloud of muck, and I turn my head this way and that, trying to sharpen my focus onto the right answers.
Do we ground the kids for this transgression? Does the fact that something is normal teenage behavior mean you don’t punish? Do we hug or do we yell? Do we step in to prevent the mistake or let it happen? Which battle do we pick?
The vastness of my presbyopia seems to extend in all dimensions, and that’s the heart of the problem. I’m so frightened by what I can’t see as I put the finishing touches on this project of launching adults. What a feeling of helplessness this blurriness is, because there is nothing you can do about it.
That’s not exactly right. It turns out there is one thing you can do: Go to the eye doctor. And she will tell you about monovision contacts: one eye for distance, one eye for close up. The screens will magically pop into focus, even as the rest of the world is a murky bog.
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