For the longest time, I hated glasses. I couldn’t stand the feeling of them falling on my face all the time, or the acne I’d get from wearing them; don’t even get me started on having to clean them all the time. Most importantly, I never felt confident in my appearance when wearing them. Whenever I thought I looked bad, I used wearing glasses as my excuse. I would tell myself, “You look fine. Your glasses are just bringing you down.” In my case particularly, my glasses would magnify my eyes, like a lot, so no matter how I dressed or how much makeup I wore, I always looked like a kid. I hated not being able to see when I took showers and I despised when people would ask to try on my glasses or ask to see what I looked like without them. The worst is when I’d show them what I looked like and people would flat out say, “I think you look better with them” or “Woah your face looks so weird”. Thanks. That’s a real confidence booster.
The point is I’d been wearing glasses all my life and once I got to university, I needed a change. I had never seriously considered wearing contact lenses because optometrists had told me I wouldn’t be eligible for them since my prescription was too strong and my lens was too thick. However, in my first year at Ryerson, I changed optometrists and I was informed that I was, in fact, eligible to wear contacts. I ordered them, and a month later, I had my training appointment. Not even gonna lie, I was scared shitless. The idea of sticking something into my eyeball just did not sit well with me at all. What if it cut my eye? What if it would go inside my eye? What if I was never able to actually put it in? Would I have just wasted my money on nothing? To my surprise, it went really well. It took me a couple of tries and my eyes were pretty irritated after 15 minutes, but I did it. Boy did it ever feel amazing. I had never ever been able to see without looking through glasses. Everything looked so clear and I felt so confident. I decided to wear them until the end of the day. I struggled for the next few days putting them on and taking them off, but eventually, I got the hang of it.
I started wearing contacts a lot. Though, I couldn’t wear them every day. But, I was wearing them really often. It got to a point where my family relatives were surprised to see me wearing glasses. My friends would never see me wearing them. The thing that surprised me was nobody really cared about whether I wore them or not. They didn’t seem to think it made me look better. In fact, some people told me they preferred me with glasses, saying I looked more like myself with them than I did without them. Others said that my face looked brighter and that they could see my eye colour and shape clearly without them.
Everyone had their opinion and I realized I was putting a lot of value into what they told me. Why did it matter so much to me? I got contacts to feel more confident in myself, not realizing that my confidence was really driven by how I thought people were perceiving me. I had no idea that people actually liked the way I looked with glasses.
That’s when it dawned on me that confidence wasn’t something that I could manufacture by altering my appearance. It suddenly didn’t matter whether I had glasses or contacts, brown or blond hair, brown or blue eyes. If I wanted to feel confident and happy in my own skin, I had to embrace all of my flaws and love myself for everything that I was naturally, as opposed to thinking that changing myself would make me love myself more.
After having that realization, I almost considered getting rid of my contacts, however, contacts offered me the comfort and logistical support that glasses didn’t. I still wanted to wear them in the winter, so that my glasses wouldn’t fog up. I still wanted to wear them at the gym to go swimming, so I could actually see. It was no longer about looking cute, but about feeling comfortable, and that’s what it should be about anyway!