Nine things only a four-eyes will understand.

By MARY WARD

I wear glasses.

No. I don’t just wear glasses. I live glasses.

Since my whole Year One class were taken into the hall to read off a poster with a few letters on it, and I was one of the lucky kids given an envelope to take home to mum, I have had a pair of spectacles on the end of my nose.

I am decked out in the most comprehensive of prescriptions. Long sighted, short sighted AND astigmatic. Holla!

Throw in some inoperable cataracts and it’s no wonder the kids on the street call me the Unseein’ Queen.*

We glasses-wearers are a special breed. With our own shared experience. Because, while life behind the frames might seem quite fun, we are united by our struggles.

You know you’re one of the brethren when:

1. Rain = death.

Every bespectacled person knows that rain is enemy number one. If it gets on your glasses and you don’t have your optometrist-sanctioned microfibre cloth handy, you’re faced with the lose-lose situation of wiping it off with some inferior material, and looking through streaky glasses for the rest of the day, or not doing anything resulting in a your vision becoming speckled in an equally annoying fashion.

And yet glasses with windscreen wipers are still seen as a humorous joke and not a solution to a legitimate and debilitating problem:

2. Stark changes in temperature also = death:

3. You actually don’t know what you look like with your glasses off:

I had this really existential moment the other day when I was standing in front of the mirror getting dressed, and, all of a sudden, I discovered** that what we see through our eyes is actually just reflected light. So our perceptions of our own appearances are, like, totally meaningless. I was basically feeling a lot like this:

But this fragility of your own existence is exacerbated when you’re a four-eyes. Because, with my glasses off, I look a lot like Adriana Lima. My skin is flawless and glowing (it’s sort of hard to make out my nose, but I’ll let that slide) and all of my clothes fit perfectly because I don’t see with good enough focus to ascertain whether they’re pulling/gaping/even buttoned up.

For some reason, my prescription makes everything look more squat. And harshly lit. And sad.

4. Eye makeup is in the ‘too hard’ basket:

I CAN’T SEE WHAT I’M DOING, OKAY?

5. The phrase “Why don’t you just get contacts?” makes you feel like this:

One of the girls in my dance class once told me that she was doing a pirouette and her contact lens shifted out to the edge of her eye. IT MOVED AROUND IN HER EYE!

Yuck. No deal.

6. You hate hipsters an irrationally large amount.

Stupid hipsters. And their optional, trendy glasses. It’s easy to wear fun and crazy glasses to an al fresco lunch when you don’t have to also wear them at the gym/to formal events/to work/on the soccer field/DURING EVERY MINUTE OF YOUR INCREDIBLY DIVERSE LIFE!

Give me some solid nose pads and subtle frames any day.

7. Watching this GIF brings on PTSD:

8. You’ve begrudgingly handed your glasses over to twenty people in the past week.

“Can I try on your glasses?”

“Yeah, um, maybe? Here you go.”

“Oh my goodness, your eyes must be horrible! I can’t see a thing!”

Oh no, person I’ve known for ten minutes, my eyes aren’t bad at all. It’s just that glasses are so much easier to source than hallucinogenic drugs, so why risk committing a criminal offence for the same effect?

9. But, despite all of this, you still love your glasses.

Because, after looking at that picture, how could you not?

*This is a lie. The kids on the street call me ‘Mary.’ Or ‘girl who just dropped something.’

**Or maybe Newton did. Whatever.

Do you wear glasses? What’s the one thing that your spectacle-less friends don’t understand?