Seeing the past with 20/20 vision
I am mixing all the metaphors this week and appreciate your patience. Also: cute (and budget-friendly) work clothes + inspiration galore.
A couple of weeks ago, I finally went to get an eye exam — the first one since I turned 50 seven years earlier. I am mostly in the market for a pair of progressives that fit properly and don’t make me feel like I’ve just downed two glasses of wine when I try to walk around. When I get up from a table at a restaurant and feel tipsy and a little disoriented walking to the ladies’ room.
And I am tired of the readers on top of my head, on my face, my hands searching for the glasses on top of my head (sometimes to find them already on my face). Digging through my purse at Wegman’s to read the label on something and discovering I’d left my readers in the car. I am way too unreliable and disorganized for that life.
The appointment was at one of those optical places that has an extensive selection of eyewear you can purchase in its storefront and they do the exams in the back. Like party in the front, business in the back.
When it was my turn, I was whisked into a room with a nice lady and asked to rest my chin on the pad of some overblown View Master, like the kind I had as a kid that you’d slide a thin cardboard disc with tiny negatives you’d slide inside and click through to look at the images. God, to think about how thrilling those primitive images seemed back then.
Anyway, I finally go in to meet with the ophthalmologist, and he is an intensely goofy man, maybe 10-ish years my senior. Like, he is jazzed about me appearing to be “intelligent,” he says, and then hands me a plastic eyeball with removable parts and starts giving me, like, the history of eyesight that I’m forced to play along with to appear polite.
He keeps pulling out plastic pieces and explaining what they do, but it’s interactive and he’s trying to prompt me to come up with what that piece of the eye is. “Starts with an ‘R’,” he says and when I pull “retina” out of my butt, he is thrilled.
When we finally get to the eye exam portion, which I’d forgotten was even going to happen after getting quizzed on the mechanics of the eye, the ophthalmologist is super pumped when it is discovered that my eyesight is pretty much 20/20. I need the pesky readers due to age but everything else looks pretty good for someone in her decline.
Afterward, I tried to find frames in their eyewear shop that I could get behind wearing every day, but the selection wasn’t really what I was looking for. Especially since my current eyewear style of choice harkens back to 1970s style. Combined with my long hair parted in the middle, I am definitely giving Gloria Steinem/Ms. Magazine circa 1982 energy.
I had brought a pair of glasses I’ve been using for driving at night since that last eye exam seven years ago into the appointment as an FYI and the ophthalmologist shared that the prescription is kind of a BS prescription. He did not use that scientific term, but pretty much insinuated that it was so low that the glasses were really just a placebo. They just gave me the illusion that the lights as I drove were a little less blurry. That I could read signs any easier than if I was driving with the equivalent of eyesight commando. Fast and free with just my eyeballs calling the shots.
Since then, I have a new confidence driving sans glasses at night, knowing that I have such good eyesight. That everybody feels a little disoriented driving in the dark. Or at least those of us of a certain age. Honestly, I’m the kind of person that you tell me one good thing about myself and I’ll run for weeks on the fumes of praise.
I thought about that eye exam while sitting at a recovery meeting this weekend, the first one I’ve been to in about a year. Over that time, my dad died and my mom had an 80th birthday and both of those events stirred up all these old feelings inside me. The tired old narratives I hoard in some storage unit in my heart, where they’re all folded up neatly in tiny plastic Costco boxes piled up and filling the space. And every once in a while something in the outside world happens and my emotions run downstairs from my brain — maybe they take an elevator or something — and throw open the garage door of that storage unit and all those boxes spill out and the old stories unfold and it’s an absolute mess trying to put it all back into place. Like, I need to Marie Kondo that shit.
It's funny, even after that one meeting — which I have to say is probably one of the consistently best meetings I’ve been to that’s always filled with all this tingling energy — I see that really should have been going to those meetings to help during those hard times last year. I look through old journals and where my thinking was and am like, “Damn, I really could have used some help donating all those boxes to the emotional Goodwill.” Instead of folding them all back up and neatly rearranging the boxes, I should have just started clearing that tiny unit out.
I thought back to that plastic eye with all of its many pieces and how the ophthalmologist pulled a clear disc from behind the pupil, explaining that there was all this gooey eye jelly behind it. “Like that watery stuff in an egg,” he said and I found it ironic that for all his prompting of me to harken back to junior year biology, he could not come up with “egg white”
Once we established that this clear disc was the “L, L, lens,” the guy told me how over time, it naturally begins to cloud and slowly affect our vision. We don’t notice it at first, it happens so slowly. But eventually, our vision becomes blurred and we are like vampires affected by bright light and become candidates for cataract surgery (and don’t worry, he explained not only what that entailed, but how much it costs and much Medicare will pay — which was insulting because I am still young enough that I make not knowing anything about Medicare my business).
Apparently, they go into your eyeball and take out the old lens and pop in an artificial one, and not only can you now see things as you did as a 20-year-old, you don’t even need reading glasses anymore. Aside from the slicing into my eyeball thing — which I really don’t know if I could handle — not having to look at the world through my always filthy readers, compounding what my actual lenses are doing, sounds pretty great.
Sitting on a metal folding chair at yesterday’s meeting, I thought about how blurred my emotional and spiritual vision had gotten lately. How it happened so slowly I didn’t even know if was happening until I really started looking around that room yesterday and remembering what recovery meant. Taking stock of all the things that I have hidden in that storage unit. I may have purged a few boxes over the last few years, but I am still hoarding a lot of old stories. Clinging to them the way I cling to the very real plastic boxes in my actual basement, like three or four of them, absolutely packed with things from my past. Old Playbills and birthday cards and handwritten notes my children had left for me long ago. You could literally create a Museum of Amy with all that stuff.
I know I am mixing up all the metaphors here and appreciate your patience, but what I am trying to say is that maybe if I keep at it, maybe one day I’ll have cleared up the way I look at the past. It will be like having emotional cataract surgery, where suddenly, I will be able to see things more clearly. That blurry old lens I used to look at things will become crystal clear and allow my thoughts and feelings to come into better focus. I won’t need any crutches to help me read any signs.
What I do have clarity about right now is that there is still work to be done. And I am here for it. I’d like to ditch all those boxes and make room for something else.
sunday shares: read + watch + book + buy
I *heart* work clothes. This week was our revenue kickoff spectacular at work, which brought me into the office for three days and gave me the opportunity to come up with three work outfits. I wore these faux leather pants from Old Navy that always get compliments AND are super cozy (which is saying a lot about pants in my post-holiday January body).
Another day I wore this satin-y skirt from Target with black opaque stockings and booties from Madewell (that I got on post-Christmas super sale and are super comfy) and paired it with my trusty Old Navy turtleneck I have in two colors and wear on repeat (and looks to be out of stock).
Inspiration overload. As part of that kickoff event this week, my company brought in the Paralympian and former Dancing With the Stars contestant, Amy Purdy, to wow us with her story. She lost both her legs up to her knees at 19 from menengitis and went on to not only walk again but figure out how to snowboard and dance the cha-cha. I am so incredibly inspired and motivated by what she has been able to achieve. The spine of her story is: If your life was a book, and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?
What’s for dinner? This week on “Asking for a friend” the Midlife community shared meal services they recommended to help me get through this cooking desert that I find myself in. You can chime in or get some ideas here. Also, do you have any questions you’d like to throw out to the group anonymously? Email me ideas here.
See you next week. xoAmy