I’ve bought some dailies that correct my vision to a -4.75 glasses prescription without astigmatism. (My original plan was -4.00 but I failed to take into account the differences between glasses and contacts prescriptions at higher degrees of myopia.) I have to say -4.75 feels much clearer than my normal vision without glasses, which is around -6.5 with astigmatism. At my real prescription, I feel kind of helpless without correction. But -4.75 borders on manageable. Everything is clearer: I can better identify objects both near me and far away, and I can read things like a phone from a normal distance when I hold it in my hand. I can imagine that if I’d been a vain teenager and resisted getting glasses until my vision was this bad, I’d think that the situation was bad but still feasible. I would have gotten used to everything being blurred, and I would be able to see most of the things I need to see with different workarounds. Or I could wear glasses only part-time, on the computer and when shopping and watching TV, if contacts weren’t an option and I wanted to preserve my glasses-less image.
I started out my -4.75 adventures in the easiest possible way and went jogging in bright daylight. A neighbor had taped a small piece of paper on their door in the stairway and on my way out, I passed it without being able to read it. This is what going bare-eyed is all about - you can’t read most things and you just have to let it go, hoping it doesn’t matter.
Outdoors, I was impressed by how much I could see. It was quite random what I could make out: sometimes I could make out a signpost with small letters 6 feet away, which felt great, while most signs were hopelessly blurry until I got next to them. However, I couldn’t see faces even when I passed people close by. With this eyesight, I’d have to get used to seeing only blurry smears instead of faces and people’s features would remain a mystery to me. It would be weird to live that way. In the distance, people were so blurry I mostly couldn’t even make out whether they were male or female. I felt it would be best to keep my eyes on the ground when approaching people and avoid looking at anyone because I couldn’t see if they were looking at me. I would probably have ignored friends without knowing it, especially across the street.
I approached roadworks that partially blocked the street and saw that there was a sign that probably said “road closed” or something. I would have to turn away, pretending I had been able to read the sign, or jog right up to it and make this seem as natural as possible to avoid seeming super blind. I realized that with this degree of myopia, my best bet would always be to get as close to things as possible without it seeming conspicuous. So I decided to run right up to the sign. It said “passage only to the properties”. Now the only natural thing I could do was to act as if I’d already decided to pass through the properties. If you don’t want to draw attention to your poor eyesight, you have to come up with a lot of pretexts for getting close to things. You will have to make many decisions because of your vision and then give the impression that there were other reasons for those decisions.
What about squinting, I thought. Would it help me navigate in the blur? I ran to a bus stop and couldn’t read the signs until I was right under them. A bus was approaching and I squinted the best I could to see its number. Hallelujah! I could see the bus number a hundred feet away. I felt proud but I could imagine that if it had been dark, even making out the bus from other cars would have been difficult.
From that moment on, I was tempted to squint at everything, testing how much I could improve my vision. While jogging, I kept shooting around intense squints - I can tell you that at this prescription, less intense squinting feels ineffective and you often just squint hard or not at all. Many signposts were still frustratingly impossible to read, and I was too shy to squint at people approaching me. However, I did squint at some figures walking away from me and this improved by capability to tell people apart by quite a lot. I could appreciate the figures and clothing of a beautiful girl walking her dog from far away. I passed by a sports field and thought it would have been difficult to identify my friends from the other side of the field without squinting. It would have been stressful to pick team members from a row of classmates standing a bit farther away. Kids were playing soccer on the field, and the ball was a giant hazy blob. While I could sort of see it, watching the game would probably have been dull.
I felt I’d already become addicted to squinting, seeing better felt so good. While I tried to do it as sneakily as possible, a few times I only noticed afterwards that there were people on the terraces or benches who could see me even though I hadn’t seen them. It was difficult to distinguish people from their backgrounds when they weren’t moving. When you go around with blurry vision, it’s easy to presume that no one will notice if you squint once in a while - it just takes a couple of seconds, after all, and most of the time you avoid doing it. People will rarely comment on it, too, which enforces the impression that they haven’t noticed. The psychological effect is still strengthened by the fact that you can’t see anyone’s eyes. Finally, and most importantly, it feels great to see better. As a result, you start to squint more and more, thinking no one has noticed. After a while, it becomes automatic and sometimes you don’t even notice you’re narrowing your eyes at things.
I arrived home safe and sound. Navigating outdoors alone in daylight was a piece of cake. In the stairway, I quickly leaned in close to my neighbor’s door to read the notice on it. “No junk mail please.” Overall, I felt strangely at ease with my limited vision, not at all alarmed like I would have thought. True, I was embarrassed to have to get so close to signs to read them, and in company I would have avoided it at all costs. Of course, if I’d gone uncorrected a lot, I would have gotten used to inspecting things very closely, though. At home, I ended up being a practical example of this. When using the laptop, I immediately felt the need to fetch my glasses because I had to bring my face uncomfortably close to the screen. However, instead of doing that, I just coped. I leaned back in a more natural position but then had to increase the font size a lot and still squint. I started pushing by cheek slightly to alter the shape of my left eye. This allowed me to read everything on the screen when I wasn’t typing. Finally, I ended up sitting on the couch for an hour or so with the laptop propped up on my knees so that it was only 8 inches from my face, and it was all right. The muscles around my eyes felt tired after an hour of squinting now and then, and I could imagine this habit causing headaches.
https://vision-and-spex.com/my-bare-eyed-adventures-t2419.html