For the vast majority of my life, my eyes have been perfect. Far away, close up, medium distance: all was crystal clear. There was a time as a child where I actually wanted glasses, right around the time I also wanted braces with the colorful bands. Instead, I was the only member of my immediate family to not require glasses. No longer.
It’s been a long time coming. I’ve noticed over the course of the last year or two that it’s gotten harder and harder to get my right eye focused. It gets blurrier the sleepier I am, which for an insomniac is an issue. By the end of each day my right eye often feels fatigued and uncomfortable. Even though I didn’t want to admit what was happening, I saw the writing on the wall, even if I couldn’t read it from a distance quite the way I used to. Finally, I broke down and went to the eye doctor, mostly to make sure there was nothing more egregious causing my eye trouble.
The final verdict is that all is well, I just need to start wearing glasses occasionally if I want the mild blurriness and discomfort to cease. Even though I’d tried similar self-experiments over the last few months, I was still genuinely shocked with what the letters on the digital eye test looked like when I covered my left eye and was forced to use only my right. It is genuinely only my right eye that has an issue. Seeing through the prescription the doctor and I had landed on was actually a bit of a rush, and made me realize just how much work my eye is always doing to keep up with it’s leftern counterpart.
Goodbye hassle free vision, hello Warby Parker (or Eyes on Fremont).
