It’s well over halfway through January. I don’t like this. Also, opticians are good.

Usually I try to write something at the end of/very beginning of the year as some sort of vague reflectiveness on the past year. This feels a bit late. And it’s really not reflecting all that much on the previous year. But I still wanted to write something to mark the existential despair of having lived through the first quarter of a shiny new century. I’ve googled how stop time more than once. Apparently it’s not possible. That is not what at least three films told me. And also Star Trek. Why would Trek lie to me?

I watched a lovely YouTube vid recently (there are many lovely YouTube vids, and last year I fell into a shiny, calming tunnel of decluttering, minimalism, and home interior vids) where the YouTuber talked about how they’d come to see aging as a privilege, as they’d lost both their parents at a very young age. Privilege isn’t quite the word I’d use for it (universal healthcare for all, fuck’s sake, access to food/safety/clean water/housing as human rights etc…), but it was a reasonable reminder that perhaps I shouldn’t be quite so neurotic about the unstoppable passage of time.

On a good, healthy, reflective note, I got glasses last year. I had increasingly bad headaches for several months, some of the later ones had me lying down in a dark room with my hands pressed over my eyes demanding the pain stop. It was not fun. I tried to drink less coffee, more coffee, hydrate more, sleep more, sleep less, and make a half-hearted attempt to stare at less screens. None of these things worked. Then a vicar emotionally blackmailed me into seeing an optician.

But of course it couldn’t be my eyesight. My eyesight is PERFECT. I may not have had it tested for twenty years but it is PERFECT.

Reader, it is not perfect. Those youthful days of thinking I could be a combat pilot but I’m simply choosing not to be because morals etc, but I COULD be, are over. I required a very mild prescription (and it is very mild but also the optician was really, really at pains to emphasise said mildness. I inquired as to why. And apparently some people are real dicks about needing glasses for the first time.)

Anyway, once I had the glasses suddenly and miraculously the headaches stopped. In conclusion, I am totally fine going to a doctor when there may be illness afoot, but I was really way too attached to the idea that my vision was PERFECT. (So sadly I can no longer mock family members who refuse to go to the doctor for ailments that clearly need professional medical treatment.) The moral of the story is if you find yourself suddenly having to cry in pain in a dark room because your head hurts, you may need glasses.