Nearsighted: A Personal Essay
Sometimes I go somewhere where I can be alone—to a park or a wooded trail—and I find a place to stop and I take off my glasses. I’m nearsighted. My eyesight is poor, but I don’t know what the numbers are exactly, and I’ve never bothered to learn them. Not knowing feels more natural to me, and it doesn’t really come up in polite conversation. All I might say is that if you were standing a few feet away from me, your features would be blurry.
But, as I said, I sometimes remove my glasses when I’m alone, and I stop, and I look at my surroundings in this way for a little while. It’s always jarring at first. Except when I’m sleeping or in the shower, when everything is close to hand, I always wear my glasses, and it doesn’t often occur to me to think of myself as “visually impaired”. Then to remove them in a place where I would otherwise be able to see quite a distance, I am alarmed all over again to rediscover what seems to me at first like a galling limitation.
The ground below my feet blurs into a nondescript plain of color. Let’s say it’s wood chips along a trail: those become a single thing, a spongy surface, suddenly treacherous. And the trees. I think of them as reverting to some older form, becoming untamed. Right before my eyes, they’ve grown together, formed alliances or knotted units, walling themselves off in places that—what had a moment ago been uncounted individual leaves—are now pools of light-strewn green with desultory edges. And even the colors don’t keep to themselves. They sink into and implicate each other, less like the dreaminess of Monet’s lilies and more like the intense, prophetic landscapes of Degas.
People with perfect or near perfect eyesight might think that I’m exaggerating my surprise and discomfiture at the outset of these meditations, but it’s hard to overstate the degree to which it’s possible, even advantageous, to forget that this is how my eyes see without the assistance of glasses.
Now that I’ve set them beside me on the bench and shoved aside those complaints from my brain that keep causing me to glance over my shoulder (You can’t see anything, dummy! From an evolutionary standpoint, this is deeply unwise); and now that I’ve relaxed the rigid muscles in my back, something strange begins to happen. It’s as if my eyes begin to realize that they’re just seeing different details instead of fewer. Or, to put it another way: I gain the ability to focus on what my eyes are seeing, instead of telling myself what they should be or could be seeing.
Movement—of shadows, leaves, birds—takes on greater importance. So too do colors and gradients, though these are more fluid than they had been. Less important is being able to distinguish branches from each other or judge specific distances. To either side of the trail is what looks now like a solid wall of undergrowth. And the trail itself, beyond this bench, becomes distant very quickly and somewhat loses its qualification.
(Strange to say, the sky remains unchanged; its clouds no less defined than they had been, the likelihood of some absolute arrival (or eternal confluence) no less conceivable. And obviously, the sun is still impossible to look at directly.)
After a time, I find that I am no longer as interested in the ability to maintain the separation between things, including my own individuality, and I myself begin to take root within my surroundings. Naturally, I rely more heavily on my other senses, but it also becomes easier to take in the entire scene visually, its interconnectedness, its oneness, its truth; and I’m able to access that important discovery that nothing about me has changed, that I haven’t lost my bearings and am not broken or diminished in any way.
One day while doing this, it occurred to me to think of these glassesless meditations as they relate to what it feels like to look at the world since discovering that I do not have a binary experience of gender. It’s not that understanding my gender identity—or realizing its fluidity—has allowed me to see better or worse, it’s just that I see differently and recognize that I’ve always seen differently. Some things are clear, other things are more confusing than they had been before, and maybe this exchange of clarity and disorientation is a feature of embodying both femininity and masculinity; which produces a necessary contentment with ambiguity, a gradual acceptance of a blended reality that is not weakened or corrupted for being so, and the excitement that flows from my ability to see how I’m seeing taking shape.
When I was in elementary school it was discovered that I needed glasses. I couldn’t see the board and hadn’t realized that this was wrong. How ashamed I felt when I came to understand that my vision was “bad.” And, yes, I think it was shame that I felt more than fear. I fought against the notion, denied that I needed accommodation. But of course I couldn’t see the board, and I wasn’t learning my letters. I still remember the day that I was given my first pair of glasses. Putting them on and walking about the ophthalmologist’s office was one thing, but when I stepped outside I was nearly flattened by the sight of the grass. “The grass, the grass!” I kept saying. I could see individual blades, even from where I stood, out there in the parking lot. The lawn was like nothing I’d ever seen.
The way home was one constant revelation. I had to roll down the window and stare, open-mouthed, at all of creation (which was our town): the leaves of the trees, the extremely precise, almost uncomfortably detailed texture of the street. Very distant signs had on them words made of letters that I could now see, and I must have felt then, for perhaps the first time, that it might even be possible to learn how to read those words, derive meaning from them.
But then there was doubt. In that evening of ecstatic looking, in the moment when I saw myself in the bathroom mirror: what would my classmates say when I walked into school the following day wearing glasses? It was not a question of whether or not I’d be teased; I would be, even if gently. It wasn’t a question of whether or not they’d see me differently. How could they not? And difference had to be punished. That’s what I’d learned without even knowing I’d learned it. But could I endure it? That was the question I asked myself in first, or maybe it was second, grade: would it not be safer to stay nearsighted and thus spare myself from those little wrinkled brows and smirks, and the thoughts that would be thought about me? Could I endure it?
Perhaps it was with similar fears (though, even the fears were hidden) that I hid myself from the exploration and acceptance of my gendered reality until my early thirties. I can think of so many reasons for this delayed intuition. One of which is the same as the reason why I hadn’t even realized it was strange that I couldn’t see the figures on the board at school. I had no alternative context with which to compare this state of things. And you might say that I couldn’t have been all that observant in the first place: did I not notice that all my peers seemed to have no trouble with the distance or the size of the letters my teacher was writing? Could I not even see that they didn’t have to squint to make out the least mark? But if there were any misgivings in me then, I was ashamed of them and so kept them even from myself. At last, I was found out, given what I needed, and not only could I then begin to see, but all my experiences up to that point made sense.
With gender it’s a little different: one can’t be asked; our experiences, if ever made known, are either questioned or rejected outright. Our knowledge of our bodies (and, indeed, our souls)—when we glimpse ourselves through the surrounding murk of expectations and assumptions—is never witnessed by others unless we testify openly to it, unprompted. Our journeys are often circuitous and filled with doubt, hesitant steps, and wrong turns (this, of course, is used against us as evidence of error, selfishness, or even mental illness).
So it may sometimes be that people like me have to make time to seek out a safe space—even if that means solitude—to be ourselves, to practice how to look at difference differently. And it may also be that we’ll sometimes have to endure our own discomfort to make others uncomfortable, to invite them into our own ambiguity, our own way of seeing, which is not, after all, fixed or reducible to a prescription.
I don’t mean to suggest a direct comparison between eyesight and gender. What a tortured metaphor that would be! I’m only exploring how they both relate to my self-perception within what I’m able to perceive of the world around me. As I sat meditating on a bench in the woods, appreciatively alone, marveling at the forgotten beauty of a world that I’d tricked my eyes into thinking was tamer than it was, I began to organize these thoughts in my head, and I also became unaccountably thankful, almost ecstatic, in regard to both my gender and my sight. Could it be that I loved being non-binary, this gendered part of myself that had gone unseen for so long? But I had been so focused on my fear of how I would be perceived by others. Could it be that I loved being nearsighted? I had, after all, two ways of seeing.
One of the most interesting features about removing my glasses for a period of time and learning to see without them, even if just for a moment, is that when I replace them—and the details come rushing back in—all of it becomes new again, a revelatory vision, almost painfully sharp. The trees, the trees! I say to myself, able to see beautiful, individual leaves all around me. And I, too, am singular. And I gaze out, with equal measures trepidation and hope, toward the edge of sight: that place which is not, after all, a limitation of sight itself, but a condition of the world: a borderless edge, exquisitely impossible to define or attain: that place that certainly keeps expanding, no matter how far you take the trail and regardless of which direction you go.
Andrew Reichard is an author who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Collagist, Exacting Clam, Black Static, LUMINA, The Stray Branch, and many others. Their first book, Vessel, was published with Solum Press in 2023. Connect with them on Bluesky @drewreichard.bsky.social.
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