Charica Roche

I’ve been wearing eyeglasses since the sixth grade, but my eyes actually got blurry as early as the third grade. I remembered the time my Math teacher held flash cards in front of the class and she immediately called me to stand up and answer one of the equations. So I stood up and squinted my eyes to clearly see the flash card. The teacher (now married) got impatient and asked me again what the answer was. I honestly told her I cannot see the flash card very well, so she let me sit down and called another student.

Click here for Election 2010 updates

Prior to that embarrassing experience, my father insisted that I eat carrots one time during dinner. I didn’t follow his advice because I wasn’t receptive to the idea of eating vegetables then.

My older brother, on the other hand, followed his advice; that’s why he has a 20/20 vision now. I didn’t listen to my father then because I thought to myself, “He’s wearing eyeglasses, and here he is, advising me to eat carrots. What an irony!” Although I realized the value of what he said years later, what my father believed about the statement “reading in the dark can cause blurry vision” is now proven as a myth because according to eye doctors, it can strain the eyes but doesn’t necessarily cause blurry vision.

Anyway, my first pair of frames was red in color, and I remembered I had this cord normally used then by our grandparents so that whenever I want to rest or relax my eyes, it would just dangle on my chest like a necklace. When I reached high school, I wore a pair of big gold-rimmed glasses with very thick lenses.

Part of it was because I thought it was fashionable, and the other part was that my father was wearing one. I laughed to myself just thinking about it.

In a way, it’s a combination of my stubbornness to follow my father’s advice and a few of my father’s wrong perceptions about vision-related information that led me to wear glasses for many years now. I don’t have plans of wearing contact lenses as of this time because I had a bad experience related to it. I was kind of forced to purchase it by a male salesperson in one of the popular optical shops here in the city. Because of his hard-selling tactic, I bought only one lens instead of a pair, and I didn’t bother to buy the other one or even wear it. I didn’t go back to that store ever since that incident.

Many people around me talked me out of wearing glasses because I look better without wearing them. I do understand their point, but to be fair to others, there are lots of people out there who cannot afford to change contact lenses every year. It’s a necessity for me because if I don’t wear it, there might be friends, former classmates or batchmates, and former coworkers who might recognize me at a mall or on the street and wanted to greet me but I don’t or can’t greet them back simply because I couldn’t see them. As long as there are stylish frames available and more people wearing them, I’m gonna keep mine.

I’m so encouraged to retain my glasses for now because of people like Boy Abunda, Randy Jackson, Diane Sawyer, Iya Villania (sometimes wears one, especially on Myx), Jenny McCarthy, Madonna, and Erwin (former host of MAG TV in ABS-CBN Cebu). Even though they don’t mention it, just by wearing glasses on TV is enough encouragement for me to be comfortable in my own skin.

So for those of you out there who are wearing glasses and are still teased by it, just remember the celebrities I mentioned. I want you to know you are a great person inside and out. You just need to recognize that, and eventually, people will accept you for who you are. Or even if some don’t, you’re still valuable in God’s eyes, and you have something to offer that perhaps no one else can.