Most people who are short-sighted could confirm that it’s surprisingly hard to notice what you can’t see. I found out I needed glasses as a teenager. My aunt was telling me about getting glasses for the first time, and what a surprise it had been to see the world in detail. She hadn’t realised it was possible to, say, make out the individual leaves on trees. She thought everyone only saw a blur of green foliage, as in a child’s drawing of a tree. We were in the garden. “Wait, what?” I said, mind-blown. “When you look at that tree there, you can see the leaves?”
I only discovered that my -6.5 prescription had become woefully inadequate when my husband took me out for a driving lesson, and I realised I couldn’t read any of the road signs.
At Specsavers, I asked Aaron Uraon, the pre-reg optometrist who wrote my alarmingly high new prescription, whether he had noticed that the pandemic meant more people than usual were coming to him with complaints about their eyesight. “100 per cent,” he replied. His
— source newstatesman.com | Sophie McBain | 10 Mar 2021