I discovered my eyesight was appalling during childhood one afternoon when my mother asked me what time it was. I had recently learned to tell the time. I stood on top of the high stool in the kitchen, held on to a cupboard for balance and peered at the clock on the wall.
My eyesight was found to be minus 6.5 in one eye, and minus 7.5 in the other. To explain how bad it was: you could be sitting across the table from me, and not only would I not recognise you, unless you spoke I wouldn’t know if you were male or female. Everything was a shortsighted blur, but until I was five or six I thought this was the way the world was. I adapted so well to a world where I could see so little that nobody noticed.
There followed decades of glasses, most of them aesthetically horrible. Glasses were still made of glass in those days, and I looked like a youthful professor in thick bottle-tops. I minded terribly about the way they looked, but the amazement and thrill of being able to see outweighed my vanity. Then came the era of soft contact lenses, which ticked my vanity box, but were also maddening to maintain. They were always getting lost. The solutions were expensive and only lasted a certain length of time; once a boyfriend drank them by mistake when I had mislaid my lens case and unwisely put them in a glass instead.
I finally took a deep breath and got laser surgery in my 30s. It was transformative. It was literally like magic. The freedom it gave me was a liberation I celebrate to this day, and I only regret I didn’t do it years earlier.
