contact lenses are nice, actually

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Starting in junior year of high school, huge round glasses have been a defining part of my appearance. I embodied the glasses Loopy plushie meme, thank you very much.

As happens to all glasses wearers, people would ask me why I didn't wear contacts. My argument was this: contacts are just an aesthetic alternative to glasses, and aesthetics aren't ever worth the inconvenience. You're telling me I have to put this thing on my eye? Every day? No thanks. Besides, my glasses are kind of cute!

Well, I'm here to admit that I was absolutely wrong. I just tried contacts, and guys, these are life-changing.

For my glasses-wearing folk: think back to the time before you got glasses. If you're like me, your vision got worse over time, but it was slow enough that you couldn't see it happening. You adjusted to your new normal, and it didn't occur to you that anything was out of the ordinary. It's only when you get your glasses for the first time that you think, waitaminute, this is what everyone else has been seeing?

Going from glasses to contacts is like that, too.

You put them in, and suddenly you can see with your eyes. Just your eyes. You realize that the glasses-wearing normal, though leaps and bounds better than the not-wearing-glasses normal, has its own artifacts that you've just gotten used to. Now, there is no frame interfering with your peripheral vision. There is no craning to see through the glasses correctly, no pushing the glasses up the bridge of your nose. There is just the world in 4k UHD, streaming directly to your visual cortex.

I don't know why I thought that contacts had no practical benefits, especially when glasses have their own inconveniences. I guess I simply forgot about them as I adjusted to my glasses-wearing life. But there are definitely a slew of practical benefits, and they're noticeable after just one afternoon of wearing contacts. No more cleaning my glasses, no more keeping track of where my glasses are at all times. No more scraping my glasses on the climbing wall! (You would not believe how big of a problem this used to be.)

Of course, contacts aren't perfect. I'm going to be real with you — putting them in was an arduous 20-minute battle. I don't know where they are getting the energy to cosplay freshly caught fish flopping out of a bucket, but boy do they like to flip out of my eyes and end up who knows where. I'm sure trying to take them out is going to be another battle. And I'll have to add another step to my daily routine, which I hate hate hate doing.

But man, for that moment of being able to just see? It was all worth it.

P.S. You can stop sending me the hamster GIF now.

You know who you are.