A Vision of Disappointment

I think everybody experiences a fair amount of disappointment in their lives be it in education, career, sports, love or any other pursuit where, despite their best efforts, they just came up short. Like most people I’ve experienced all of these to some degree or another and they’ve all been disappointing, but over all the bad exam results, unsuccessful interviews, lost sporting matches, failed relationships and never materialising Christmas presents (I’m still waiting on a Lego pirate ship twenty years on) I know precisely the most disappointed I've ever felt.

I was about seventeen or eighteen and just starting to get into pubs and clubs on a regular basis. It must have been summer time because I was staying with a childhood friend in my home city. I remember waking up in his spare room a little disorientated and bleary-eyed after a heavy night of adolescent drinking, trying to take in my surroundings and get my still slightly intoxicated brain to process exactly where I was. However, my brain was far more interested in the fact that, although bleary-eyed, I could focus on the poster on the wall at the end of the bed. This you might rightly think is and of itself not usual, unless like me you have worn glasses with a strong prescription from a young age.

I sat bolt upright in bed, rubbed my eyes again to clear any remaining sleep and began to focus on things around the room. To my utter delight they were all in focus, I could see the poster, I could see the clock on the table opposite, I could see all these things without my glasses, I could see, I could see, I COULD SEE!! I didn't understand how I could see them, but I could. I rubbed my eyes a number of other times to make sure that it wasn't some trick, that some bit of sleep hadn't inexplicably got lodged somewhere in my eyes enabling me to focus in a similar way to when you pull your eyes at sides to provide a brief moment of focus, but let go before anyone sees you in case they think you're performing a racist impression of someone from the Far East.

There was no logical explanation for why my vision had suddenly returned to 20:20 but did I care? Not one iota, this was the greatest thing that had happened to me, I was over-joyed. I hated wearing glasses and I hated even more not being able to see without wearing them. I had recently gotten contact lenses for sport which had been fantastic and given me a taste of what life was like without glasses and I had loved it. Now I would no longer have to worry about lenses or glasses, this will be great!

My thought process as I walked to the bathroom, shortly after jumping out of bed with vigour and dancing a jig to my new-found sight, went something like this - 'This is going to be great, perfect vision! No more glasses or contact lenses, sweet! Perfect vision, just like having contacts lenses in, but none of the hassle of keeping them clean. Yea just like having contacts lenses, like last night, perfect vision without...just like wearing contacts...like last night...contact lenses...'

That was the moment, as I stared at my bloodshot-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, of greatest disappointment. From the shear elation I had felt moments earlier about my new life as a perfect sighted person to the crushing realisation that I had slept in my contact lenses, that to is in my world the definition of disappointment.

Moments before I was on such a high that I was impervious to the effects of the previous nights drinking, now the intoxication that had led to my inability to process what had actually happened was coming back with a vengeance. As I lay on the bed with a once again blurred ceiling spinning above me, thinking I couldn't possibly feel any worse, the chorus of Amazing Grace started to echo in my head.