Ever since I was about four years old I have worn glasses. My first memories stem from when we discovered that my eyesight was, for lack of a better word, horrible. When you're four it's hard to tell someone that everything you see is blurry, because you don't know any different. So what if I saw two televisions instead of just one? That meant I could watch two Barneys at the same time. But eventually other people began to notice how my eyes wouldn't focus.
One day at my babysitter's house I was seated on the couch talking to her daughter. Apparently I was crossing my eyes because the girl gave me a quizzical look before calling her mother into the room. "Look at her eyes," she said. Of course, my babysitter understood what was happening, and that night when my mother came to collect me from daycare we found out that I needed to go see the optometrist.
I liked glasses, and I still do. Unfortunately, other people thought and still do think that they are means for taunting and teasing. The worst time period for this was junior high. I had gone to a charter school for elementary school, where no one tended to make disparaging comments, as they were used to you. But when I attended a public junior high school, anything was fair game. For me, it was the glasses. I would come home crying because some kid in some class of mine would tease me about how thick my glasses were. My mother always tried to comfort me and say "big eyes are always popular" even though I'm pretty sure having yours magnified to the size of golf balls isn't what those magazines really connote. Everyone kept asking why I didn’t just get contacts. Unfortunately, when your vision is as bad as mine, contacts don’t help, and they can really hurt your eyes. So though it seemed like a great option, it was pretty impossible.
Thankfully, the teasing about my spectacles subsided significantly as the years went on. My freshman year I had a very strong group of friends, so I never worried about what outside people were saying, because my friends thought that anything that set you apart was interesting. High school came, and people had bigger things to worry about than that my glasses resembled two magnifying lenses. I see them more as an accessory now; something to add to my face that can match whatever I am wearing. (Plus, as the years went on the styles of glasses became more and more interesting.) There may be occasional comments, made in a loving manner usually by family members, (who all coincidentally wear glasses as well) but since I realized how much I like glasses, it has been easier to laugh it off.