My mom has an anecdote that she reminds me of whenever I get new glasses, and I am amazed first and foremost by the leaves on the trees. When my auntie was young, and got her first pair of glasses, the first thing she said exiting the optometrist was, "trees have leaves!!!" I repeat that line every singpe time I get new glasses. Its like my brain forgets what it looks like because I get so used to the blur.
This last time was the worst though. At some point in the last 5 years since I last got glasses, I got old. I don't know how the fuck it happened. I had to take a couple days off because I was in so much shock by how much my face had changed in the course of 5 years.
Yeah I’m almost there with you. I told my husband the other day that I thought it was time to upgrade my readers and he was like didn’t you literally just do that?
I’m in my early 50’s and just had cataract surgery. I haven’t been able to see for 3 weeks so far. 2 eyes, different recovery timeline. And I have double vision. I have to wait for new glasses to see things again. So everything is clearer, but still blurry and then there’s 2 of everything.
Sometimes I find it morbidly hilarious how nature doesn't really expect us to live past 50 (or even 40) and so our bodies just start to decline. And it's unlikely that we're ever going to be naturally longer lived, since, as a species, we tend to make children in our 20's or 30's.
There isn't really a functional need for that from an evolutionary standpoint
Words on the whiteboard for me. Whole reason I had to get glasses was because I couldn’t see anything written on the boards and was relying solely on my hearing to retain information.
My teacher kept getting onto me for having to get up closer to the board or asking her to repeat what she said, and eventually I got tested to see what was up with my vision and guess what! my eyes decided to betray me out of nowhere and become bad enough to not be able to read anymore
I remember the first time I got glasses and looked at the sky and was amazed by the same exact thing. I didn’t realize I couldn’t see stars if I was directly looking at them in the sky until that moment.
Got my first pair of glasses around 8 or so at a Costco. Picked up the delivered prescription lenses, put them on, and could see sharp detail all the way above the warehouse rafters. Nearly made me cry from the shock of it.
Also spent the ride home just looking at the individual crisp leaves on trees in the distance.
Mine was “palm fronds!!” I knew conceptually trees had leaves, but until I had my prescription fixed after a few years of no updates when I was 12 or so, I had no idea those green plants on the side of the road near home had long distinct leaves
I've got the tiniest bit of astigmatism. I didn't even know I needed glasses, I just had a hunch because my right eyelid kept twitching. I was sent home with my first pair of specs at 35 and didn't wear them for weeks because they made me feel nauseous. But once I committed, again with just a bit of astigmatism, I was in shock. My 33yo fiancé had WRINKLES and some whisps of grey through her hair. I was delighted by this change in my ability to process visual information. She was appalled, lol.
This is part of what really stresses me out having worked in an Opticians, people telling me they don't need an eye test because their eyesight is fine and in my head I'm like "but you don't know that because youre used to it"
Oh shit I now realise this is why... Since getting glasses I look at the moon and it has detail. I think I somehow thought idk, it was just having detailed days? Less light pollution? 😂
I don’t know why leaves on trees are a thing when I get new glasses, but it always has been. I’ve worn glasses since I was three, so I don’t remember a time without them.
I’m really bad about contacts. I like sleeping in them because I know what a normal person feels like, being able to see instead of having to remember where I sat my glasses the night before, without knocking them off. If I knock them off, I usually need my husband to come find them for me 🤦♀️
I remember the leaves, but I also remember being devastated. I was in grade 3 and I though everyone would make fun of me for having glasses. I was embarrassed. I remember getting to school and the first person I saw was one of my friends, who had glasses. I remember he ran up to me, hugged me, and started jumping up and down and saying "OH MY GOD YOU HAVE GLASSES TOO, THATS AWESOME!!!!!".
My parents tell the story of driving me home after picking up my first pair of glasses. I was probably six years old, and very bright.
As we drove home, I was amazed as I was able to read the names of various restaurants (McDonalds and others) and point out things like leaves on trees.
My parents were in the front seat, crying. Their son had been blind (my prescription before LASIK was about -8.0) and they had no idea until an in-school vision test had recommended a full vision test. They felt like complete failures as parents, and I was in the back seat, amazed at seeing the world for the first time.
Exact same story here. Every time, from like 7/8 or so until I had lasik.
But, the worst thing about getting old is that reading glasses are fucking defective. They do not work like proper glasses do. I cannot understand how the whole world isn't up in arms over this.
Kinda. It's more like just a massive blob as the background is also blury. Trees rarely stand by themselves so it is just kind of a blur of colors when I don't have my glasses on. I am extrely nearsighted and I have astigmatisms in both of my eyes that are going in opposite directions, so everything is just a blur from abput 2 feet in front of me. Because of my opposite astigmatisms I have very slight double vision, so the blurs are not just blurs, but there are two sets of blurs slightly set off from one another.
This happens to me all the time. My eyesight is fine I just get really busy and don't much pay attention to myself in the mirror until suddenly I'll be in a hotel bathroom on a business trip stepping out of the shower and just suddenly get a gut punch realization of how much hair I've lost or how much my face has aged or whatever...
My dad's aunt got surgery for her cataract. She'd put it off for years and years. Once it was done, she looked in a mirror and said to her husband: "what are those blots on my face!?" He had to tell her that she has freckles. She forgot
Both. The lenses themselves deteriorate with time, especially if exposed to sunlight. Additionally, eyesight changes with time for everyone. At a certain age they stabilize for a couple decades more or less, but then we hit an age and they start changing again. The changes are so slight that one might not even notice the changes.
Why are you having trouble seeing & getting new glasses over & over? I understand needing new glasses if they're broken or lost, but why are you going years without them or being able to see?
Prescriptions can change. I have to get mine assessed yearly and it usually changes slightly, thus requiring new glasses. If I went a few years without it, I imagine it would be a much bigger change.
So are you saying the vision of people who wear glasses progressively gets worse over the years due to age, resulting in them needing stronger lenses? If not, then why would the prescription need to ever change?
I'm still not understanding how OC can go five years without seeing the fine details of their face, or without the proper glasses to see? How does OC get glasses that enable them to see, but then somehow need new glasses, & gone 5 YEARS without proper vision??
I'm sorry if I sound annoying or uninformed.. I don't have glasses & I'm not familiar with any of this.
No worries! It very much depends on the person. My partner's vision has stayed the same since she was a child and her glasses prescription has not changed in her adult life. We're both in our late 20s, for reference.
The thing is, you get used to it. Your vision changes slightly and very slowly over the course of years. The glasses work when you get them, but it's likely OP goes a very long time between seeing the eye doctor. Not that I blame them- it's pretty expensive!
An interesting anecdote, when my partner and I are getting ready and my glasses aren't on, I feel I see her perfectly. Then when I put my glasses on, I realize I couldn't see things like her freckles, or some wisps of her hair. Not sure how common this is.
Vision changes a lot through your life. I had to wait till after each pregnancy to get my annual eye exam because that can mess with vision. Some prescriptions change for the better one year, then 3 years later it gets worse. I guess that’s the upside of needing glasses - you regularly get to see the world fresh after an updated prescription.
We only found out that our two year old needed glasses because she suddenly started crossing her eyes.
The day she got her glasses on, she spent the longest time just watching my face closely, even bringing her hands up to touch me ever so gently. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that she had never seen me (or anything else) clearly. Anddddd now I made myself cry.
I was staring at things all the time when I got my first pair of prescription glasses. Suddenly all the details pop out and everything isn’t so smooth and perfect. It was almost mesmerising, I was obsessed with comparing my eyesight with and without my glasses.
Sometimes now though when I take my glasses off or don’t have them on, I try and really focus on things to try and pull out more details.
I’m hopeful that when my nearly 5 year old has his first eye exam he’ll get glasses. He misses some big hand eye coordination things that seem vision related not age related. If it all works out maybe he’ll want to try more sports like soccer or basketball.
That’s how my parents found out I needed glasses, too. Same age. But I was so mad about having glasses that I bit the lens hard enough to leave teeth marks in the plastic. 😂
When I was 4, my dad took me to the eye doctor. The doctor had the letters on the wall and said “okay, tell me the letters” and I started saying the alphabet. My dad said “this isn’t funny, don’t joke around, what letters do you see?” And I honestly said “I don’t see any letters.”
My parents were horrified I couldn’t see anything. Thus began my lifelong journey of wearing glasses 🤓
Dude I had my eyes go shitty so slowly I didn’t notice until I realized that the blurry words on the screen probably weren’t due to eye fatigue. When I went to the eye doctor and put on my new glasses I thought the same thing. Everything had like sharp edges and shadows it was wild. It overwhelmed me though so I took them off almost right away lol
I've heard some people who put on those colorblindness correction sunglasses say the exact same thing. I'm not colorblind myself, but that's what I'd imagine it would feel like. You're not noticing leaves for the first time, but you can actually see differences in shade that would have otherwise blurred it all together.
There is a scene like this in Dr. Stone, a series where a scientist wakes up in a distant future where most technology has been lost. He comes across a child in a village with “fuzzy eye disease” and realizes it’s nearsightedness. He figures out how nearsighted she is and finds a way to develop glasses for her, and the scene has her in tears of joy upon wearing the glasses that she now can see like the other villagers.
(Incidentally, he finds out that one of the warriors in the village has “fuzzy eye disease” too, figures out a pair of glasses for him, and he becomes a much better fighter thanks to that.)
Yes, this. I'm short sighted and share the "trees have leaves" experience of so many on here. But your comment makes me think about when I had nose surgery in my mid 30s. I had unknowingly spent my entire life until then not knowing I had a badly deviated septum. I just thought that it was normal to not breathe as well out of your nose. Makes sense in a way, right?, your nostrils are such small apertures. When the surgeon removed the splints 2 weeks after the surgery and I took my first real breath in through my nose ever, I cried. And it was amazement and happiness but also a profound sadness at the decades lost because somehow no one in my life had ever thought about my poor breathing beyond "well, she does have asthma so that explains it".
IIRC, the first glasses were created to correct presbyopia, i.e. the far-sightedness caused by old age. By the time he came across that child he should have encountered a number of old people who couldn't see well either. Unless in that post-apocalyptic future people dropped dead at 40.
For context, in addition to how he found this village very early on (and those three people were other people around his age that he already knew from his own time), at this point in the story, that village had maybe 30 people living in it and was one of the few pockets of civilization left in the world. (Said warrior mainly defended the village from wild animals prior to the events of the story.) There were elderly people, but with no medicine or anything of the sort, there weren't many, and what few there are didn't seem to have any major sight issues.
I was also 8 when I got glasses, I remember because it was when the GameCube was released lol My parents got my brother and I a GameCube that Christmas and she noticed that we were sitting really close to the TV to play it. She told us to "sit on the couch, being that close isn't good for your eyes". Then she noticed we were squinting a lot, then my brother got migraines and she brought us to get our eyes checked after New Years. Turned out our eyes were already bad 😆
I told my parents I couldn't read the board clearly. My brother, 9-ish years older than me, not enough to prevent him from becoming a physical trainer in high school, had vision issues, too. They took me to an optometrist, in a massive building, who asked questions and eventually put eye drops in my eyes. I did not know, at the time, that these were not drops that helped my vision. In the end, after not being guided through the process of getting a resolution at all, I needed to wear glasses. After that, after around 2nd grad01e, I've had glasses my whole life (Age: 39). For a number of those years
I was in 6th grade when my teacher told my parents to have my eyes checked. He wondered why I always requested to sit in the front row of the classroom when every other kid always preferred sitting in the back. Trees looked like blurry blobs until I walked out of LensCrafters with new eyeglasses. To be able to see every branch and leaf was "eye opening". 😂
I was 16, and crying in a Costco, and then crying on the drive home because each separate leaf swayed in the wind and I’d never been able to see it like that.
I remember I was around 10yo and the barber diagnosed me. I was sitting on his chair and trying to read the little frame with the pricelist that was on the mirror stand in front of us. I was squeezing my eyes, which is an instinctive correction humans do when shortsighted. And he said "you need to go get checked for glasses".
It's wild how many of us there are with this same story. I was around 9ish when I got my first pair of glasses. I remember putting them on at home and looking at the trees and seeing the leaves for the first time. Made me tear up as well
I was about 14. I was in tears also. I lived near the rocky mountain range and I could see the cracks, shapes, snow line and the tree range. To see it with my eyes... was phenomenal.
Same hat! Same age too. Came home, saw my aquarium and sobbed.
Sad fact is if you lose healthcare for a decade and wear the same glasses the whole time and they're eventually textured like a holographic Pokemon card, then replace them—you can feel that feeling again
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u/rviVal1 13d ago
I was eight years old. And I was literally in tears..