I have lived for as long as I can remember with the common medical condition of nearsightedness. In fact, while I can be corrected down to 20/20 vision, both of my eyes are very close to or at 20/400 uncorrected (above that, uncorrected vision is considered “legally blind”). My mother has poor vision, but it is correctable, and a few of my cousins have correctable, but poor vision as well. I was always under the impression that vision issues are genetic and that the whole world had issues with nearsightedness on par with the United States. Why else would so many people have vision issues? My mother grew up in an era where kids were expected to be outside from the time they left for school until dinner time. She didn’t watch TV, like she always warned me about (I’ve been an avid gamer from a young age, I blame my older brother), but her vision is almost as bad as mine. She is an English teacher, however, and has been reading since kindergarten…just like me.

When we went over in class how nearsightedness is actually most common in literate countries, but as common as farsightedness in illiterate countries, it made a lot of sense to me. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of literature in the 13 years I’ve been reading on my own. I may have started with one fish, two fish, but now I’m reading 700 page epics, and have been since my mid-teens. I tend to read at night, with the book fairly close to my face (if I don’t have in contacts or glasses on, it literally has to be two inches away), which Dr. Wede explained was the likely cause of nearsightedness, having to focus on small text very close to your face. It was nice to know why my vision is as bad as it is, definitively, and now I have something to retort to my mother every time she tells me using my phone and computer all the time will make my eyes worse.