You can’t fail an eye exam
First published on Medium on 2/18/2021
I’m sitting in my eye doctor’s office in the darkened room looking through the lens contraption. He asks me to read Line 4. No big deal: I’ve done this every year since I was 13. I get all the letters all correct so we move down to the next line — It’s not great but I get most of them correct. Then we move to the second to last line and I squint. I open my eyes wider. I blink a few times. I think to myself, “Is it an O or a C? A 4 or an A?”. So, I guess, and I get most of them right. Then we move to the last line. I can’t fake it. I barely get 1–2 correct (truth be told, they were probably stabs literally in the dark). Then he swings the contraption in front of my face and before I can say anything, he starts with the “better 1 or better 2? Better 3 or better 4?”
“WAIT!” I say. “Give me another chance. I bet if I do the last two lines again, I can read them PERFECTLY!”
At this point, my eye doctor looks at me like I’m crazy. About 10 minutes later, I realize that getting the letters perfectly correct is not actually helpful. In fact, the only thing it will guarantee is that I will get a prescription for someone with 20/20 vision, not for the 20/250+ person I am.
According to a study cited by the British National Institute of Health that examined myopia by ethnicity, Asians lead the pack with 25.6% of school aged kids![i] So, the odds were already against me from the beginning. I am literally part of a population that eventually is more myopic than not. But sitting in my doctor’s office revealed a whole new neurosis — even though all logic told me that accuracy of the measurement was the point, all I could think was that I couldn’t get all the answers right. I didn’t have a “perfect” outcome. In fact, I FAILED.
There, I said it: I.FAILED.THE.TEST. Not once, but twice. And really, if I look at the historical picture, I’ve failed that test at least 40 times in my long, nearsighted life. Later, I asked myself, why did I care so much? It’s not like reading a line with bigger letters and numbers was actual failure. But the response was visceral. Truth be told, not getting things perfect was devastating — just little, in the corner of my gut. You either passed or you failed — but the implications regardless of the outcome have much more impact than the outcome itself. Somehow, I was programmed to look at perfection as the end goal — so I wondered, why, in my world, was perfect was a standard for, well, EVERYTHING. I mean, a perfect outcome in the case of the eye exam was simply, a new pair of glasses with the correct prescription.
Recently, I was asked to provide the operational definition of “Perfection.” It was after I answered the simple question of “how’s it going?” with “It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good.” So, why did I feel the need to qualify “It’s pretty good” with “it’s not perfect?”. Perfection is an evasive standard, possibly impossible. Adding the word “but” pretty much made the situation imperfect. In fact, even in the case of vision, 20/20 is not “perfect” but by definition, “normal”. So why care so much? And more importantly, why achieve a perfect score when that is literally the last thing you should cheat on an eye exam? How could that possibly serve me? Well, it wouldn’t.
I’m a long-time lover of words. I study them, I learn them, I use them. Hence there is a tremendous amount of irony that one word, “Perfect” has so much power in a single language. That any instance of less than “Perfect” automatically implies substandard. Less than. And as a word lover, it seems ridiculous that one word can hold so much space in the English language (except maybe the word “Fuck” which is arguably the greatest word in the English language.) So, I decided to take the word “Perfect” out of my vocabulary. Now if you ask me, “How’s it going?” You are more likely to hear an expansive answer. Because my day is more likely to be:
· Wondrous
· Exhausting
· Frustrating
· Inspiring
· Energizing
· Challenging
· Thought Provoking
· Invigorating
· Intriguing
· Life changing
But definitely not perfect.
The Confession
I’ve been told to fail bigger…I can honestly say, I’ve done it and lived to tell about it. But nothing hurts more than when you learn that you have failed your child. Becoming a mother was, is, has been the meaning of life for me since I was young. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure of. I didn’t care who, where, when they came from, but I was going to be a GREAT mom. AND I was going to work my ass off to make sure they had every opportunity to be who they were meant to be. BIG MISTAKE. I really didn’t think about the implications of my sole mission in life. It’s laughable now, really.
My daughter is now a senior in high school and there were some really hard conversations over the past few years: work ethic, preparedness, commitment, opportunity. I was working SO very hard to give my daughter the perfect life. That she wasn’t expected to do any of the things I did — there were no piano lessons unless she wanted them, no Saturday Chinese school, any the sport she wanted to do (soccer, skiing, swimming, climbing, running, mountain biking, hiking, to name a few) and art, art, art. We didn’t care about straight A’s, SAT scores or AP classes. But in trying to deliver the perfect childhood, I created the exact thing I was trying to avoid — pressure, expectations, fear of disappointment. It was less about the opportunities I lay before her and more about ME trying to be the perfect mom. I became the exact thing I was trying to avoid. Not my proudest moment.
The Lesson
I told my daughter about my epiphany. She said “FINALLY!” and gave me a hug.
The other day I wrote down:
“when do her dreams become mine?” and
“when do my dreams become hers?”
Just like my “failed” eye exam, getting the all answers correct might get you a perfect score, but answering the right question means you get a new pair of glasses and see things a bit more clearly. And there are a million words you could use instead of “perfect”. What would be possible then?
[i] Ethnic Differences in the Prevalence of Myopia and Ocular Biometry in 10- and 11-Year-Old Children: The Child Heart and Health Study in England (CHASE), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3055754/