February 2024
Contact Lenses
Audre Lorde
Lacking what they want to see
makes my eyes hungry
and eyes can feel
only pain.
Once I lived behind thick walls
of glass
and my eyes belonged
to a different ethic
timidly rubbing the edges
of whatever turned them on.
Seeing usually
was a matter of what was
behind my brain.
Now my eyes have become
a part of me exposed
quick risky and open
to all the same dangers.
I see much
better now
and my eyes hurt.
I came across this poem reading “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde” Edited and with Intro by Roxanne Gay.
The last three lines hit me powerfully.
I see much
better now
and my eyes hurt.
I got my glasses in fifth grade though I hadn’t been able to see a chalkboard in years by that time. I didn’t know that I couldn’t see. I just thought it was normal.
When I put my glasses on, I was amazed at the clarity. It was a relief. “Oh, this is how people see what is on the chalkboard.”
After years of being with glasses, my parents caved for contacts when I started high school. More relief. I could see WITHOUT squishing my glasses when lying down. I could see when I swam and in the shower. If I thought seeing through glasses were amazing, my contacts created a new person who could do and see things she never could before. It felt like a whole new lease on life.
Every night though I would take my contacts and return to my glasses for the evening (usually for reading).
One evening, I was reading with our Christmas Tree in front of me. I looked at it over my glasses (that is the one great thing about glasses, you can convey SO many words without saying them). I saw the blurry colors of light, the shimmery parts. It looked ethereal. Dreamy.
And wonderful.
How many years had it been since I’d seen the tree like this? And how had I missed this? How had I let this go?
I wondered about 10 year old me, in the back seat as I returned home with my first set of glasses. The highway took us through farm lands, mountains and trees. Trees, upon trees, upon trees.
I imagined I marveled that I could see details I never had imagined. I probably saw the cows and farmhouses for the first time. The leaf detail, the variations of color in the rocks on the mountains to either side.
But as a teenager in front of that Christmas tree, I realized what I had missed, what I had sacrificed to see clearly. I forfeited a dream world, a world where things were softer, blunter and in some ways more “what you can’t see won’t hurt you.”
I still wear contacts and glasses. Despite being a candidate for Lasik, I have no desire to lose the softness and ease that going without either contacts or glasses gives me.
I think about this often as I have become an adult. (It still baffles me that they let me and my friends be adults in this world, what were they thinking?!) How ignorance can really be bliss. How once you truly “see” something, there is all sorts of work (and usually pain) to deal with and process.
We strive for and say we want the truth. Yet we know that if we received the full truth, so much hurt, so much pain. So like me we “take off our glasses” for a moment’s reprieve.
One of my guides asked a similar question during a Reiki training. “What would happen if we all really went around telling the truth?” Something was triggered in me as I started my laugh, cry, snort combo, imagining the relief of being honest and the pain that we would cause each other with it.
He made the mention “It’s too bright. You can’t blind people all at once. Just a little light at a time.”
Seeing…sometimes too bright. No need to blind yourself. No need to hurt. Just a little light at a time.