I got my first reading glasses just over a year ago. I’ve been wearing glasses for over two decades and am very short sighted. My close / near vision is fine but as I’ve gotten older I’m struggling more with the in-between.

Finally after realising I kept peering over my glasses with my face inches from the computer screen I got reading glasses for when I’m working on the computer.

Although under / unemployed, I spend most of my day at my desk often only getting up to refill my diet coke glass, eat or flop on the bed.

I often forget to take my reading glasses off when I leave my desk which means the world is a little blurry. Or if I do remember I just take them off and don’t retrieve my normal glasses. In that case the world is very blurry but I know my way around my house so unlikely to walk into furniture.

It does mean however I often wander through my house – and life it seems – in a little haze. Like being a bit tipsy, when everything is… fine. Everything is lovely. People are lovely. Butterflies and unicorns. (Okay, maybe that’s going too far. People are rarely lovely.)

And then I put on my proper glasses. And I’m forced to gasp in horror. Or similar.

@budhelisson via unsplash

It’s particularly an issue in the kitchen, which I guess is where I go when I get up from my desk partially blind, and where I sometimes go first thing in the morning before finding my glasses.

Because it’s sometimes filthy. Well not filthy, but dirty. There are marks on the countertop. There are crumbs and stains on the white tiled floors. Drops of god knows what. And I can see them all. Clearly.

Without my glasses—slightly vision-impaired—it all looked white and shiny. Spotless. Unblemished.

Then I look closely and I see the grime. The marks. The failure.

And yes, this is obviously a metaphor for my life, my propensity to navel gaze and overanalyse and wondering how to remove my glasses. Other than the being tipsy thing, of course.

So I wonder, is looking too closely sometimes a bad idea?