Before my little sister was born, I was the youngest of three boys and apparently the ugly duckling of my family. My two older brothers, Forrest and Garrick, were born a year and a half apart and — thanks to my parents’ faultless DNA — sported matching chestnut-brown bowl cuts through much of my early life. In a family of proud brunettes, my bright blonde locks were a novelty.
Eventually my younger sister Hannah popped out and I was no longer the Butler family’s solitary blonde, though as I grew older I began noticing other significant differences between my family and me. I was the only child born with brown eyes. Until adolescence I was under the impression my family was classifiably insane because they a) loved the outdoors and b) regularly took us on trips where I had to exhaust my little body only to stare at stupid dirt and rocks and trees and stuff. While my brothers were off playing video games at friends’ houses I was left home alone to draw, color or read. On long car rides to visit my grandparents in Southern California my dad would put in a Beatles CD to everyone else’s delight — I just sunk into my car seat, arms crossed, yearning for Britney Spears to add some synthetic color to what I believed was boring, old-people music.
Fifteen years later I have come to realize that with most of these differences I’ve either overcome my childish pride (I’m a low-key nature freak and absolutely adore my parents’ genius taste in music now) or learned to bask in my individuality (I’m easily the most artistic Butler child, and my blonde hair/brown eye combination really suits me). That said, there’s still one disparity I haven’t quite come to terms with: my perfect vision.
Both of my brothers and my parents have such bad eyesight that they’ve each been prescribed corrective lenses to make up for it. The stylish wires and rods that house these lenses instilled a sense of inadequacy in my bones.
Sure, my healthy eyeballs have aided me in countless situations. Because of them I can watch films in the theatre without awkward glare or smudged lenses. Really I should be grateful that my vision isn’t impaired, but for as long as I can remember I’ve been strangely covetous of my older brothers’ ability to look like child savants just because they wear glasses. My father practically invented glasses, he looks so cool in them. For the majority of my life I stood sans glasses, unaware of one simple lifehack that could change my life forever if I thought hard enough about it.
I remember discovering a couple pairs of my dad’s glasses in my parents’ closet in high school. The first was a gold pair of circle-lensed glasses with brown tortoiseshell temples that looked like the spectacles George Costanza wore in Seinfeld — a fact that should deter anyone else from wearing them but only made them more of a necessity in my accessories drawer. When I put them on I felt a rush that left me feeling like a sexy professor. The other pair had thick black rims atop the lenses and a wire holding them in on the bottom. These were the same style of glasses Malcolm X famously wore during the civil rights movement. I felt like an ad executive in “Mad Men.”
Despite the fact that these lenses were prescribed by a doctor to fix my dad’s poor eyesight and as such had actual working lenses, I proudly paraded these glasses around school. They obviously impaired my vision and hurt my eyes, but 17-year-old Addison was thrilled to finally amass the instant respect of my peers — a respect that would not have been possible without his gorgeous little specs.
The backlash I received during those weeks at school for wearing glasses that were not my prescription was aggressively forceful. “Why would you wear those, Addison?” “You don’t need them, take them off.” “You can never understand the struggle glasses-wearing people go through, so stop pretending!” I heard all of these phrases from various friends. Apparently those without perfect vision take great offense to posers like me in fake glasses. Partly because of this salty reaction and partly because my eyes were physically sore from this experiment, I laid glasses to rest in the top portion of my closet.
In the years since this unhappy goodbye I’ve purchased a few non-prescription lenses from shops like Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, Topman and American Apparel and tried them out on the fresh college crowd I now associate with. Although the reactions haven’t been nearly as negative as those from high school, I’ve been sorely disappointed in the lack of quality in these frames. They looked cheap and exposed me as a poser at first glance. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I unearthed my dad’s specs again and found myself jumping with joy at their incredible quality and crisp look.
In an effort to save my eyes, I loosened the frames a bit and took the lenses clean out of the glasses. That’s right — I now sport lensless glasses, and I couldn’t be more proud. Sometimes you have to throw caution to the wind with your sartorial decisions and give zero hoots if what you wear offends people or makes them uncomfortable. As long as what you choose to emblazon is not sexually explicit or overtly racist/homophobic/sexist/generally insulting, you shouldn’t care what others think of what you wear, and that is that.
@ChronyArts