Tags
anxiety, Asperger's Syndrome, Autism, bullying, D.A.M.P., glasses, He Was Weird, relationships, Self Esteem
Last week I had to get a new pair of glasses. The frames from my previous pair were too mangled to continue wearing so I had to choose new ones with the new prescription. After looking at several pairs, the female sales assistant pointed out a couple that I might be interested. I tried on a few pairs and one pair that seemed to work looked a lot like the black horn rimmed glasses I wore until I was 13. This brought back flashbacks to that time and lots of anxiety. While I don’t think I’m vain, I did ask the sales assistant to tell me what they looked like from a woman’s perspective and she said she liked them. Therefore, those were the ones I got.
These were a bad memory from my youth
To many people, my anxieties were over nothing. After all, why get all obsessed over a pair of glasses? The answer is that wearing glasses like those above, contributed to a lot of the bullying I received back then. I remember one time someone said hello to me while he was with someone else who didn’t know me. While they were walking away, I heard the person who didn’t know me ask the other, “Is he as uncoordinated as he looks?” There were also teasing comments like, “You’re really good looking” and when I did eventually switch to wire framed glasses, my friend confessed that I looked like a fool in the old ones above. After that, I vowed that I would never get those glasses again.
Getting the new glasses did a lot for my self esteem, especially after some people complimented me on how different and better I looked. I would have liked to say that the new glasses solved all my problems but unfortunately, they didn’t. The seeds that produced all the bullying I was going through had long been firmly rooted. In fact, one bully threatened to ram the new glasses down my throat. Fortunately, I moved out of that town a few weeks after and I would like to think that showing up to the new school on the first day wearing those wire frames kept me from being identified as an easy target. It also contributed to the fact that I only suffered one-one hundredth of the amount of crap there than I did in my previous town. So, I think that I can draw a conclusion that perhaps glasses do make a difference. If anything, they do wonders for self esteem.
This is probably why I highlight the glasses in “He Was Weird.” Mark also has glasses like the above at the start of the story and maybe that leads to him getting bullied on the second day of school. Like me, when he does get new glasses, it doesn’t end the bullying he’s suffering and unfortunately, he never gets to move to a new town. If he did, maybe the new impression would have helped him like it did me.
To buy He Was Weird, go to: https://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474485228&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird
Peaceful Rampage 