Age and eyesight

I am 48.  In my mind, I've always thought of myself as having 20/20 vision.  Things within my vision were crystal clear and I had acquiesced to the fact that wearing glasses was not in my deck of life cards.  From a very young age, I wanted a pair.  Was it to make me look smarter?  Or, did I have some other mysterious objective?  I honestly don't remember.  But after cheating and failing to fail my eye exam I accepted the fact that I would grow up without a partner on the bridge of my nose.

Over the last few years, seeing details at a distance began to require extra effort, concentration and a measure of squinting.  Road signs on the horizon, the descriptions on Netflix, and the shipping rates at Canada Post became a guessing game.  Did I mention that I am 48?  Apparently this blurring of the facts is a direct result of the piling on of the years.

After over four decades, I finally visited an eye doc and discovered that my long dormant desire for glasses would be fulfilled. They arrived yesterday.

I felt quite dizzy at the outset.  Sitting at my cubicle at The Redpoll Centre, I found I was having to twist and tilt my head to find focus.  However, the fine print at Muna's office across the way was crystal clear for the first time in memory.  Driving off MacDonald Island, the road signs in the distance were miraculously easy to read, as were the details on Netflix when we sat down to watch TV later in the evening.

I'm still a little puzzled about the rules.  Should I be striving to wear them all the time, or only when I feel I need them?  Are there benefits and/or drawbacks to both?  I'm sitting here typing at my desk and I can see everything that I need to see clearly; the glasses are resting on my bedside table.  And what is this thing about having to move my head to focus in on the stuff close in?  I felt like was in a movie several times yesterday as the object of my attention was in focus but everything in my peripheral vision was foggy.

Several people warned me about going down stairs.  As I am wearing progressive lenses, glancing down as I descended the stairs was a little weird, but I managed.

I'm eager to preserve my vision as best I can.  It is a precious sense that I'm relying on to serve me for the rest of my life.  If glasses will help and regular visits to the doc, I'm all in.