Not a dramatic, life-altering regret, but the quiet, persistent kind that surfaces every time I reach for my glasses to read something I might once have managed perfectly well without them.
The story of how I got here is, on reflection, equal parts amusing and instructive.Â
It begins with a school reunion and a stubborn desire to look older than I did.
The Reunion
Twenty-five years after completing school (Class X), I walked into a hall full of former classmates I hadn’t seen since we were teenagers. Long enough for faces to have changed in ways that time makes inevitable.
Except, apparently, a few, including mine.
“You look the same. Nothing has changed.” That was the majority verdict when I walked in, by classmates who seemed genuinely pleased by the observation. I received it politely.Â
But somewhere underneath the bonhomie, I felt something unexpected: mild dissatisfaction.Â
I was already heading a department for two decades. I had earned, I felt, a certain gravitas. And here I was, being told I looked like the teenager they remembered.
I wanted to look my age.
A year after the reunion, I booked an eye test. Not because my vision was troubling me in any meaningful way, but because I had entered the forties, and glasses felt like the appropriate accessory for a man who wanted to project the experience he had accumulated. The doctor examined me thoroughly and delivered his verdict: I didn’t need glasses yet.Â
Things could wait.
“I’m forty-plus,” I offered, as though my age were a medical condition requiring immediate intervention. He looked at me. “I’m ten years older than you,” he said, “and I still don’t wear glasses.”
That should have been the end of it, except that it wasn’t.
Two and a half years later, I found myself at another eye clinic, accompanying my mother for a check-up. Since I was there anyway, I reasoned, I might as well ask again. The second doctor’s conclusion was identical to the first: no glasses required.Â
Not right away; I could manage comfortably for several more years if I chose to.
I did not choose to. I pressed. I cited mild discomfort — though even as I said it, I wasn’t entirely certain the discomfort was anything more than occasional screen fatigue.Â
The doctor, unconvinced, eventually relented and prescribed reading glasses. I walked out quietly, satisfied with myself. Looking back, this is the part of the story that makes me wince most.Â
Two separate doctors, examining me independently, reached the same conclusion, and I overruled both of them because I had a different vision. I wanted to look a certain way, and I used a mild, unverified complaint to get what I wanted. The consequence was predictable, even if I didn't predict it at the time. The eyes, once given assistance they don't strictly need, tend to lean into it. Over the next few months, I grew so accustomed to the glasses that reading without them became genuinely uncomfortable.
The mild dependence I had manufactured out of impatience became a real one. I had invited a problem in through the front door, and it had made itself at home.
What I Was Actually After
I wasn’t really after better vision. I was after a different version of myself. One that looked less like the student my classmates had remembered and more like the professional I felt I had become.Â
The glasses were, in my mind at the time, a shorthand for seriousness — a visible signal of age and experience that I thought my face wasn’t yet providing on its own.
Subsequently, the grey hair arrived naturally. And when it did, I found that I had, rather naturally, achieved the look I had been so impatient for.
My Mother's Position
Which brings me to the other half of this story and an argument that has been running without resolution for several years now.
My mother is eighty, and she colours her hair. She has been doing it for years and sees no earthly reason why she shouldn’t.
Her position on my grey hair is equally unambiguous.
“Please listen, son. You must colour it. You’re too young to have white hair.”
“Mom, I’m fine with it,” I tell her.
She finds this baffling. Here is her youngest child (she still sees me as one), greying prematurely (so she believes), with the tools to address it readily available, and choosing, apparently, to do nothing.Â
What strikes me, turning the whole story over, is this:
We spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to look like a different version of ourselves — younger, older, more serious, more approachable — rather than simply settling into whomever we actually are at this moment.
Two doctors told me twice that I didn’t need glasses. My face, left to its own schedule, would have arrived at the look I wanted without any intervention.Â
The Thought to Take With You
I still wear my glasses. That ship has sailed, and I’ve made my peace with it. But I’ve stopped trying to manage how old I look — in either direction.Â
No colouring the grey, no chasing a younger version of my face, and no more convincing doctors to prescribe things I don’t need because I’ve decided it’s time for them.
My mother and I will probably never agree on this. And that’s fine.Â
This post is part of an ongoing series sharing life lessons from lived experience — the small decisions that, on reflection, reveal something worth examining.
About Me
I am a thinker at all times. I see, I think. I hear, I think. I read, I think. Every weekend I write. I would love to know what you think.