5- Yasmin G: The Mask of Just Two Eyes

    I look back into third grade everyday that I pick up my glasses. I hear the kids yelling and screaming at me while I was just trying to eat my lunch:

   

    “You’re too ugly to be a girl!”

    “No one wants to pick you for OREO! You’re too ugly!”

    I see them pouring their hot, chicken noodle soup their mom packed for them in a thermos all over me, cackling:

    “Well at least you look a little prettier!”

    “Are you hot now Yasmin?”

    Ouch. Everything hurt so bad. But then there was Andrea. Andrea. She had long curly hair, beautiful eyes and her glasses. Oh, her glasses. 

    She was picked first for everything, even though she was terrible at sports. All the boys picked her for OREO, and dodgeball, and tag, and FourSquare and every other game you can think of kids playing. I wanted all the boys to like me like they liked her. 

    She was in the bathroom washing her hands with her glasses off when I walked in, and from what I remember, she didn’t look that great without them on. And my third grade brain thought:

“Wow. That’s the only thing that separates her from me. Those stupid glasses. Why can’t I have glasses?”

I went home to my mom and demanded I need a vision test. You know, the whole playing sick thing when you didn’t want to go to school- I did that with glasses. I told her I couldn’t see and I was starting to get all these headaches when, at that age, I didn’t even know what a headache really felt like. 

“A Q H Z T” the eye test sign read. “A O N M T” I said out loud. 

I was prescribed these horrendous glasses that I could barely see out of. It was agony. I, then, began to experience my first headaches as an eight year old. But, I walked into the school the next day and all eyes were on me. I walked to my spot on the floor getting ready to sing Over The Rainbow for the morning class and not one pair of eyes left these glasses.

They were hideous.

Absolutely, 

completely, 

truly, hideous. 

But that didn’t stop me from thinking I was better than everyone else. Even though I couldn’t see the numbers on the board, or the whispering lips of the girls right in front of me. I was finally liked. Finally, I fit in.

I grabbed my glasses this morning and thought about the reasons I did that, as a stupid, stupid third grader. Now, nine years later, I need my glasses everywhere I go. I can’t drive without them, I can’t read without them, I can’t be myself without them. Two pieces of plastic with some fiberglass lenses in between them. I don’t even know who I am without them. 

Some girls use makeup to hide their insecurities. Some use clothes, or men, or good grades, or hair dye. I use glasses. The glasses I didn’t even need. The glasses I now spend hundreds of dollars a year on. The glasses. They saved my idiotic third grade self, but they ruined me for eternity.