In junior high, I began suspecting that I couldn’t see as well as I should, but the idea of wearing glasses felt devastating, so I kept it to myself. That summer, during a family trip to Rome, I declared the Sistine Chapel “lame,” triggering the angriest reaction I’d ever seen from my father. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. Fellow tourists turned around as he hissed: How dare I say something like that. Think something like that. Did I have any idea how lucky I was to be here? How had he raised such an ungrateful daughter? Was I insane? Was I blind?
Violently, he ripped his glasses off his face and smashed them on to mine. I looked up, and I began to cry. The Libyan Sibyl’s toenail. The folds in Isaiah’s robe. The muscles! My father, next to me, was silent and satisfied. He thought I was weeping for beauty, for art, for the miracle of human ingenuity and the impossibility of deep time. But I wasn’t. I was weeping for me. I really did need glasses.
But I didn’t get them for another seven years. I relied on contact lenses exclusively throughout high school, refusing to even own a pair of glasses that I could wear in the privacy of my own bedroom. Finally, in college, I relented and for the next two decades, I wore some combination of black-framed glasses, contact lenses, and prescription sunglasses (often indoors…) As the years wore on, my tolerance for the discomfort and hassle of contact lenses decreased and by the time I was in my mid-30s I bothered with them two or three times a year. I wore glasses 99.9% of my waking life. I put them on the moment I woke up and often fell asleep with them on. Without glasses, I couldn’t recognize my closest friends, many of whom had never once seen me without them.
As my prescription grew stronger, the lenses grew thicker and the glasses heavier. They left red indents on the sides of my nose (according to my husband… I couldn’t see them) and throbbing pain behind my ears. Every few years, I made an appointment with a laser eye surgery doctor.
The first one I visited examined me and concluded that I was not a candidate for Lasik because my corneas were “too bumpy.” The second one examined me and concluded that I was not a candidate for Lasik because my eyeballs were “too football-shaped.” The third one didn’t bother to examine me at all; he read my prescription on the chart as I walked into his office and just laughed.
Then a year-and-half ago, I got a haircut. The stylist asked me to remove my glasses and I asked her to let me know the moment I could put them back on because until then I’d be staring off into a grey haze of shadowy figures. “I used to be like you,” she said, in a thick Milanese accent. “And then I got ICL.” What was ICL? Implantable contact lenses, she said. The surgery, originally developed for people with cataracts and now used too on those who were not candidates for Lasik, took only a few minutes. They cut a little slit into your cornea, slip the lens in, and your eye heals around it, essentially leaving you with permanent contact lenses. Yes, it sounds gruesome, she went on, but you were out for the procedure. You had to adhere to a strict schedule of medicated eye drops for a month, but besides that—and the fact that it wasn’t covered by health insurance—the procedure was easy and painless and perfect. She said it cost her $10,000 and it was the best money she had ever spent.
I went home, poked around the internet for five minutes, and made an appointment with board-certified ophthalmologist Dr. James Kelly of Kelly Vision Center. A few days later, I walked out of his office with the assurance that the surgery was FDA-approved, reversible, and especially good for patients with dry eyes or an aversion to traditional contact lenses. My eyes were not too bumpy, or football-shaped, or generally far-gone. He could perform the surgery that same week if I wanted.
Instead, I hemmed and hawed for six months and wrung my hands about the expense, to the bafflement of everyone I told. $10,000 to see, they’d say? That’s it? Finally, I accepted that it was indeed a small price to pay for the restoration of one my five senses and scheduled the surgery.
One morning this past September, I dropped my daughter off at daycare and took the subway from Brooklyn, where I live, to a charmless part of Manhattan that I usually try to avoid. A receptionist ushered me into a sort of ward, I changed into a polyblend gown, offered up my forearm for an IV drip of anesthesia, and asked a nurse to pile seven blankets atop my lap.
Then I guess I passed out. After an amount of time that felt like four hours but was apparently only 45 minutes, I woke up with moderately blurry vision and took an Uber home. I slept all day and when I opened my eyes that evening I could see across the room without glasses and with perfect clarity for the first time in 25 years.
It took months to adjust to the novelty of not having large pieces of plastic affixed to my face. I still swat my hand around the surface of the bedside table each morning in search of glasses that are no longer there. I still touch my temples and am surprised to feel them just… there, with no hinge nearby.
Certain outfits look better now that I don’t wear glasses: collars no longer seem so fey, cardigans are less dowdy, and tight dresses less “sexy librarian.” I love being able to read shampoo bottles in the shower and dive carelessly into bodies of water. It’s only now though that I realize how much I had been shielded from the world and its judgments. Wearing glasses did not eliminate my vanity, but it dulled it greatly. On a day-to-day basis I had felt exempt from beauty—and grooming—standards and insulated from the aesthetic assessment of strangers. I did not think of myself as looking good or bad, beautiful or ugly. I was just wearing glasses. I never applied makeup; if I felt the need, I’d wear sunglasses instead. My hair remained in a permanent pile atop my head. I bought beautiful clothes but they seldom left the closet. Wearing glasses was like having a broken arm—an impairment so glaring that trying to distract from it or compensate for it seemed pointless and silly.
Now, without glasses, I can finally see myself. My dark undereye circles are darker than I had assumed, and my big nose is bigger. I can see my pores and my errant eyebrow hairs. Glasses had not only obscured these imperfections with the blunt force of black plastic but had made “fixing” them irrelevant. Now, for the first time, my face seems worth improving. I am learning for the first time really, at the age of 37, how to apply makeup properly. In a shocking twist I could have never seen coming, mascara—known to improve quite literally everyone’s appearance—also improves mine (I’ve found Lash Slick by Glossier to be the least clumpy). I brush it on after patting on a bit of under eye concealer of unknown origin (the label wore off long ago) which I put on over a few dabs of a peachy color correcting paste. A few spots of Nars cream blush and a swipe of Face Stockholm lipstick in “Cranberry Veil” and I look at least 30% better than I did minutes earlier, which is obviously the entire point of makeup: something I only understood abstractly before.
There is a self-indulgent pleasure in this daily routine, but also the sad, bad feeling of futility. I am grateful for my new perfect vision and if given the choice to do the surgery again I would, but I miss the old version of myself who wore glasses, not the way she looked but the way she looked, i.e. rarely in the mirror. I think back to my seventh grade self, who, if asked, would have rather died than wear glasses. I’d love to shock her. One day, I’d say, many years from now, you won’t need glasses anymore but you’ll sort of wish you did. She’d never believe me; she’d probably roll her unseeing eyes.
Read more first-person stories about transformation:
