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[8/366] spaaace and optician
Jan. 8th, 2020 07:47 pm8 Would you rather live in a deep-sea station or a space station?
I have wanted to go to space since I was five years old. A space station around Earth is about the most boring way to go to space but if it's what's on offer I'll take it!
--
I woke up to my phone alarm this morning and was tiredly confused as to why I'd set it. I wasn't working today. Then I remembered that I got a phone call yesterday morning when I was walking Gary saying I was due a routine appointment and did I want to make one. I was surprised enough that I just agreed to one (today! and I could've had yesterday if I hadn't been about to go to work! I guess no one thinks this is a good way to spend the first week of January).
The phone call was quick enough, and being distracted by the dog probably didn't hurt, that I didn't start to get anxious until it was over so that's good. I've had enough times of going to the optician here as an adult that I know it's fine, I know it's not like when I was a kid and scary invasive stuff was done with insufficient communication. (And to absolutely no actual purpose as far as I can tell; no treatment or course of action that ever helped me seemed to result from it.) But I still feel very vulnerable and anxious and...triggered, honestly. So in that way it was good that it was first thing in the morning and it was now instead of in a couple weeks or whatever when I could work up a good fret about it. My anxiety has been off the charts lately; it doesn't need that kind of help.
So that's why my alarm went off (confusingly, at the same time as it would've been for work) this morning. I got through it fine. I actually really love the optician, he's patient with me -- I feel like everything takes a long time for me and and having to manage my frustration at that as well as the scared small child that my brain reverts to in this situation (I couldn't actually rest my chin on the thing today because I couldn't keep still...which unfortunately made that "shining bright lights in my eyes" part of the test take longer and thus before it was finished I'd convinced myself it was taking a long time because something was wrong, and I was stuck in a horrible anxiety loop to the extent that I was honestly surprised when the optician said eceyrting was fine even though it has all been fine for my entire life and I had no reason to think it wasn't!)
The other thing I love about the optician is that unlike the eye doctors I saw as a teenager when I was finally allowed to get glasses (My mom still believes that wearing glasses makes your eyes worse because they get lazy! So I was in sixth grade before I had any. Poor little Holly. I won't even cross a road without my glasses now.), this one isn't after every tiny little bit of possible improvement that can potentially be made in my vision. My left eye is much worse than my right, so my glasses used to have much thicker lenses on the left but now they aren't, because all that stuff didn't make my useful vision much better. It just seemed to tire out my eyes, which is a real issue and a massive problem when you have nystagmus -- the thing that makes my eyes jump back and forth, which they do a lot more when my eyes are tired. This time he's actually weakened the prescription a bit in my "good" eye, he thinks it was too strong last time (the variability of my condition means that if I get my eyes tested on a particularly good or bad day, it can affect my glasses prescription so that's a lot of fun!). I really appreciate him not thinking that "more is better."
However the change in the prescription meant I needed new glasses, and picking frames was actually the most stressful part of the day. The optician reminded me, as he always does, not to choose anything too big because the lenses are so thick that'd make them really heavy. And coats can be precipitous which was a big concern for me today. After those two stresses, what the glasses looked like was a distant third place, so having the receptionist "help" by telling me that a style I was unsure of looked better than the kind I already have just seemed to make the whole process seem interminable. I am pretty bored with the narrow square-ish black plastic frames I've had approximately my whole adult life, but it looks like there are reasons for them as practically everything else I tried out got ruler out for some reason or another. They did have the same frames I've got now in a dark brown instead, so I'm getting that this time.
The downside to doing this first thing in the morning is that I used up my entire day's supply of visual processing spoons already; I felt pretty dreadful by the time I left. At least this afternoon I got to go see Stuart, first time in about a month, and that was nice. We watched a movie (Paddington 2, which I'd been prevented from seeing at the cinema so it was nice to finally catch it) and had lots of tea and chat. But even then I was home early and wondering when it could be bedtime by seven o'clock.
I have wanted to go to space since I was five years old. A space station around Earth is about the most boring way to go to space but if it's what's on offer I'll take it!
--
I woke up to my phone alarm this morning and was tiredly confused as to why I'd set it. I wasn't working today. Then I remembered that I got a phone call yesterday morning when I was walking Gary saying I was due a routine appointment and did I want to make one. I was surprised enough that I just agreed to one (today! and I could've had yesterday if I hadn't been about to go to work! I guess no one thinks this is a good way to spend the first week of January).
The phone call was quick enough, and being distracted by the dog probably didn't hurt, that I didn't start to get anxious until it was over so that's good. I've had enough times of going to the optician here as an adult that I know it's fine, I know it's not like when I was a kid and scary invasive stuff was done with insufficient communication. (And to absolutely no actual purpose as far as I can tell; no treatment or course of action that ever helped me seemed to result from it.) But I still feel very vulnerable and anxious and...triggered, honestly. So in that way it was good that it was first thing in the morning and it was now instead of in a couple weeks or whatever when I could work up a good fret about it. My anxiety has been off the charts lately; it doesn't need that kind of help.
So that's why my alarm went off (confusingly, at the same time as it would've been for work) this morning. I got through it fine. I actually really love the optician, he's patient with me -- I feel like everything takes a long time for me and and having to manage my frustration at that as well as the scared small child that my brain reverts to in this situation (I couldn't actually rest my chin on the thing today because I couldn't keep still...which unfortunately made that "shining bright lights in my eyes" part of the test take longer and thus before it was finished I'd convinced myself it was taking a long time because something was wrong, and I was stuck in a horrible anxiety loop to the extent that I was honestly surprised when the optician said eceyrting was fine even though it has all been fine for my entire life and I had no reason to think it wasn't!)
The other thing I love about the optician is that unlike the eye doctors I saw as a teenager when I was finally allowed to get glasses (My mom still believes that wearing glasses makes your eyes worse because they get lazy! So I was in sixth grade before I had any. Poor little Holly. I won't even cross a road without my glasses now.), this one isn't after every tiny little bit of possible improvement that can potentially be made in my vision. My left eye is much worse than my right, so my glasses used to have much thicker lenses on the left but now they aren't, because all that stuff didn't make my useful vision much better. It just seemed to tire out my eyes, which is a real issue and a massive problem when you have nystagmus -- the thing that makes my eyes jump back and forth, which they do a lot more when my eyes are tired. This time he's actually weakened the prescription a bit in my "good" eye, he thinks it was too strong last time (the variability of my condition means that if I get my eyes tested on a particularly good or bad day, it can affect my glasses prescription so that's a lot of fun!). I really appreciate him not thinking that "more is better."
However the change in the prescription meant I needed new glasses, and picking frames was actually the most stressful part of the day. The optician reminded me, as he always does, not to choose anything too big because the lenses are so thick that'd make them really heavy. And coats can be precipitous which was a big concern for me today. After those two stresses, what the glasses looked like was a distant third place, so having the receptionist "help" by telling me that a style I was unsure of looked better than the kind I already have just seemed to make the whole process seem interminable. I am pretty bored with the narrow square-ish black plastic frames I've had approximately my whole adult life, but it looks like there are reasons for them as practically everything else I tried out got ruler out for some reason or another. They did have the same frames I've got now in a dark brown instead, so I'm getting that this time.
The downside to doing this first thing in the morning is that I used up my entire day's supply of visual processing spoons already; I felt pretty dreadful by the time I left. At least this afternoon I got to go see Stuart, first time in about a month, and that was nice. We watched a movie (Paddington 2, which I'd been prevented from seeing at the cinema so it was nice to finally catch it) and had lots of tea and chat. But even then I was home early and wondering when it could be bedtime by seven o'clock.