Embrace the Different

I stood at the back of the line, shuffling my feet, my untied tennis shoe laces flopping on the floor. The line moved forward slowly. I could feel an ache begin just above my eyebrows, spreading across my forehead. I tried to relax my eyes, make them less squinty.

The school nurse stood at the front of the line, her thick-soled white shoes bright against the dingy tiles in the hall.

“Read the first four lines,” she told the fourth-grader standing in front of her. I leaned forward straining to hear.

“E F P T O Z L P E D P E C F D.”

She nodded and the line shuffled forward again.

“E F P T O Z L P E D P E C F D,” I whispered underneath my breath. Over and over, I practiced the letters. I tapped my tennis shoe against the floor in rhythm with the letters. The line moved forward again.

“E F P T O Z L P E D P E C F D.”

How come they could all see that little blurry chart? Why did I always go home with a headache and red eyes. I wanted nothing more than to be normal. But normal always got away from me. It was fuzzy and I could never see it clearly.

“Next,” the nurse said and I stepped forward.

I breathed deeply, reminding myself to look at the chart and say the letters slowly. I wanted her to believe me.

“E F P T O Z L P E D P E C F D.”

She nodded and I sighed, walking back into the gym to hide from flying rubber balls that seemed to multiply during dodge ball games.

I only kept up my charade for a few more months. One afternoon my mom came to pick me up from school and watched me walk up to the chalkboard to write down my homework assignment.

“Why did you do that?” she asked when I joined her in the hall.

I shrugged. “I just like to.” I had glasses within the month.

That was more than 20 years ago. I have evolved from glasses that were so big that my cheeks made half moon prints on them, to frames so thin that my lenses popped out once a week. According to my eye doctor I am “ridiculously nearsighted” and every morning I grope for my glasses on the nightstand so I can make it to the bathroom without tripping.

So last week when I went to the eye doctor, I was surprised when he slipped a pair of contacts in my eyes “just to try.” I blinked and watched the world go from fuzzy to clear. I had peripheral version for the first time in 22 years! I did a double-take when I walked by the mirror, not recognizing the face I saw there. I kept pushing my phantom glasses up on my nose.

“So, do you want to get them?”

I blinked my eyes and stared in the mirror. I hadn’t seen myself clearly without glasses since I was a nervous little girl, memorizing the eye chart in gym class. Over the last two decades, they had become part of me. I had fought against them so hard, but now they had worn two tiny dents in the side of my nose. Somehow they had become part of my identity. A kind of security blanket. In them, there was a seed of memory of what it felt like to be different. It seems silly, but when I took a deep breath and put on my glasses before I walked into school, it was like admitting “I’m scared of being different, but I’m more scared of being blind.”

I blinked again. “I think I’ll just take the glasses,” I told the doctor. I leaned my head back and he stood over my right shoulder, gently removing the lens from my eye. He moved to my left eye, and suddenly everything was blurry again.

I wiped my glasses on the hem of my t-shirt, then slipped them back on. Maybe one day I would get over my silly attachment to my glasses.

But not today.