Life Through Two Lenses

When I was eight, our teacher hung a yellowish piece of paper on the blackboard and said, “Copy this.” I was sitting at the end of the classroom and suddenly felt confused. I could only see a large, blank sheet. After a while, I remember raising my hand and asking shyly, “Mrs. Teacher, I can’t see anything there.” She must have been used to that because she immediately replied, “Try getting closer.” I took a couple of steps toward the center of the room, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie appeared on the yellow paper. That’s how I discovered I am myopic. From then on, I wear prescription lenses about sixteen hours a day. I am nearsighted by about seven diopters in both eyes, so I just can’t live without vision correction. I know that there are many, many worse cases than mine without reaching blindness, but I think most people don’t understand how we myopics see the world. There, I tried to reproduce how I see my monitor without glasses, while writing this post. The alternate version of this…