8/26/23: Somehow my very first blog post (from November 2015) got “unpublished” and turned back into a draft, so I’m re-publishing it now, 8 years later. UPDATE: my eyes are worse and those millennials are 40.

I remember exactly when it happened. It was four years ago. I had just turned 46 and I was trying to figure out how to use the new digital camera I got for my birthday. I was staring at the tiny little buttons and settings for quite a while. Then I looked up, took the picture, and when I looked back down at my camera, the little settings were blurry. WTF! Just a second ago, they were perfectly clear and now I couldn’t see them at all. I ran inside and sat down. I immediately thought “brain tumor,” but I decided to have some cold water, just in case it was dehydration. Miraculously, when I picked up the camera again, the small settings were clear.

After that, I occasionally had trouble reading tiny print. Having been blessed with perfect 20/20 vision my entire life, this became the first undeniable sign of middle-agedness. Sure enough, the eye doctor confirmed that this type of thing is part of the normal aging process and comfortingly reassured me that “it only gets worse.”

In the beginning, I embraced the fashionable aspect of reading glasses. They come in so many cool colors and designer styles! I bought way more glasses than I actually needed and wore them jauntily atop my head whenever I wasn’t using them. Now, at 50, I just keep a pair in as many rooms and pocketbooks as possible, because it’s a real pain in the neck to run around looking for glasses every time you want to read something smaller than a STOP sign.

But here’s the thing…if you find yourself without a pair, say in a dimly-lit restaurant, or at church choir practice, someone almost always offers you theirs! “Here you go, borrow mine” someone will say, and takes the glasses right off their own face and hands them to you. You see, you’re never alone in the 50+ club. We might not be as skinny and sexy as those 30-year olds at the next table, but we know something that they don’t fully understand yet: Nobody escapes…time marches on for everyone. So when you take those sparkly Target-brand readers from your friend’s ever-so-slightly wrinkled hand, give her the wink that says “thanks and yeah, I know, it’s happening to us too.” I’ve got you old friend.