I was once poked in my eye with a bamboo stick. It hurt like hell.
The first time I knew I was short sighted was when the primary school sent me to an optometrist to have my eyes checked. I hadn't known that I was until then -- I just thought that no one else could see the blackboard at the front of the class clearly either.
As it happened, I had excess pressure on the orbs of my eyes, and this made me shortsighted. Shortly afterwards I was using spectacles, and have been wearing them ever since. The only times I've taken them off are when I sleep, have a shower, or for sex (and not always then).
Not much of a diability is it? Heaps of people have glasses, so what's the bother?
Well, being a "four-eyes" has made a difference over the years, especially in social ways. It put me out of sporting circles fairly quickly. When I was a "boy"(1), I'd be stuck on the bench while the rest of the class played on. I was always the last cricketer to bat.
And kids can be viscious and mean, having spectacles can be another reason to be picked on. Even now I see the stereotype a lot in the media -- the poor timid woman who has her hair in a bun and wears spectacles, who only becomes "sexy" after she lets her hair down and takes off the specs. Ha!
A few years ago I toyed with replacing my spectacles with contact lenses. Because I'm so short sighted, only certain soft clear types could be used (no coloured ones). But I thought it was worth it, another part of my gender transition(2). There were problems however.
The first one was overcoming the phobia of putting things near or in my eye. I can't stand to see films where people get stabbed or knifed in the eye, it really affects me. The first time I had my contacts put in it was with me sitting against a wall while an attendant tried to do it for me. It was months before I could be at ease putting contacts in my eye.
And also, the things are just so expensive. I've gone through three pairs of lenses -- they keep ripping and splitting. I remember one of the first times I was putting them in by myself. The phone rang. Any sensible person would have ignored it, but I dropped a lense on the carpet. I ran hysterical to the phone and shouted to the person to call me back. Then I found that it had dropped on my blouse and calmed down a bit.
Maybe I'm just not good with them in. In 1996 I was on a float in teh Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. We were all dressed up in g-strings, green body paint, and not much else. Wearing spectacles would have been out of place, so I wore my contacts instead. As it happened, I had them in for 16 hours (I went to a party and literally danced until dawn). I had to take them out and my eyes just felt so dry.(3)
Right now I can't afford to get a new pair of spectacles or contacts, so I'll stick with the spectacles I have.
Footnotes
(1) Hey, I'm transgendered, right? That meant that I was brought up as a boy, even though I thought of myself as a girl. At the time it was just so important for me to "pass" as a boy and to fit in. And I was also confused. Being ostracised for one more thing didn't help.
(2) One of the reasons was that I wanted to change how my face looked. Everyone around me was used to me as fronting as a guy who wore spectacles. Maybe too, I'd fallen for the media image of being "sexy" without specs.
(3) Weird things happened afterwards. My spectacles were back at a friends place. While I was waiting for a train to get there, this guy tried to sell me drugs because his wife "needed some medication from a hospital". Only in Sydney...