I got new glasses this week.
Normally I wouldn’t dedicate an entire blog post to something as mundane and uninteresting as getting a new pair of glasses, but this is a little different for me.
For years now I’ve worn thin wire-frame glasses with long rectangular lenses. Just plain black frames. They weren’t flashy. They weren’t obtrusive. They served the purpose of keeping the lenses in front of my eyes so I could see clearly, and for years I was satisfied. It wasn’t something I thought about.
Recently, we noticed our son was squinting at things. Given that both my wife and I wear glasses, as does just about every relative on both sides of our families, it was inevitable that our boy would need glasses at some point. He reached that point. As we were shopping for frames for him through an app my wife uses that projects frames onto your face through a camera filter, I was struck by inspiration. This was a change for my son, and perhaps for that reason I decided to join him in that change. I shopped for new frames, too.
They arrived in the mail this week.
My son looks great in his new glasses and he loves them. I… am getting used to these new frames.
The frames are thicker than anything I’ve worn in decades and the lenses aren’t thin and rectangular. They’re round and big. On the one hand I can see more completely than I could with the rectangular lenses, but the thicker frames combined with their dramatically different shape means I look different. A lot different.
When you wear the same frames for years on years you don’t realize how it defines the shape of your face, or at least accentuates parts of it. These new glasses have, to me, slightly changed the way I perceive the shape of my face. Areas around my eyes that have for years been concealed by narrow frames are now encircled by the new ones. What was once an unobtrusive and practical accessory now draws attention to itself. While I consider myself to have a flashy and outgoing personality I have never dressed in that manner, so even a small change like this takes some getting used to.
But I don’t regret it. Change is good and a different perspective can be enlightening, even for something as trivial as how a new pair of glasses makes your face look. I relish moments to see things in a new light, and in this case it’s how I perceive myself physically. I look forward to coming around to this new look completely.
And if I don’t, I can just put my old glasses back on.