Blurry Text and Tortoise Shell

The pair I picked off the shelf had a solid black frame. Simple, safe, on promotion. The salesman spotted me hesitating and swooped in. “These will suit you better,” he said, handing me the same model but in tortoise shell. “Softer.”

I tried both in the mirror. Honestly, they looked almost identical. But he had that confident tone of someone who sells glasses for a living, so I nodded and went along with it.

For weeks, letters on my screen had been slowly dissolving. I could see mountains clearly from far away, but the email right in front of me? Absolutely not. The optician confirmed it with a shrug. “Age.” One word. No anesthesia.

And suddenly, a memory popped up: my friends taking photos of restaurant menus and zooming in to read them. I remember thinking, How bad can it be? Now I understood. Completely.

Suddenly, I started noticing people wearing glasses everywhere: strangers, colleagues, half the population of Lausanne. Had they always been there? Probably. But now it felt like a secret club I was being initiated into.

Two weeks later, I went to pick up my new tortoise-shell frames. I had waited for them like a kid waiting for a parcel, imagining how productive and intellectual I would instantly become.

Then I put them on at my desk. Boom. HD vision. Letters so crisp I felt personally attacked by my own to-do list.

But the moment I looked away from the screen, the rest of the room went blurry. So began the legendary routine: glasses on, glasses off, glasses on… I basically became my own optometric light switch.

During online meetings, I took them off. I wasn’t ready for people to see me in glasses. But eventually, squinting at my screen during calls looked worse than actually wearing them. So I gave up and kept them on. Clients saw them. Nobody fainted. My mom even said I looked like Diane Keaton.

And today, during an online meeting, I suddenly noticed all three of us, me and my clients, were wearing glasses. I felt oddly… part of the gang.

And just like that, the glasses stayed. They became part of my face, a tiny, practical reminder that time is moving, and that apparently I’m the last one to know when my eyes decide to unionize.

Wearing glasses means different things to different people. For me, it was a small, slightly funny, slightly uncomfortable milestone. A reminder that ageing isn’t dramatic. Sometimes it’s just blurry text and a pair of tortoise-shell frames.