Christian posts in the forum:
TL:DR? If you are following this program, are building good eyesight habits and know that you should wear your minus that’s fine. But if you have tried other things and haven’t seen results, have not been wearing your minus, or think it will speed your recovery to just completely go without glasses: you could save MONTHS and YEARS of no improvement by taking some minutes to read this.
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You may have heard that idiom that goes along the lines of “one man’s loss is another man’s gain.” Well here’s my loss, my mistakes, my wasted time, my stubbornness… let this be your gain; let this be a good lesson.
Since the end of 2012 when I started trying to gain my vision back by wearing plus lenses, I completely stopped wearing my contacts or any minus except for driving. I had around -2 on my right eye and -1.75 on my left eye and -0.75 of astigmatism on both eyes. The first two weeks of not wearing contacts and practicing wearing plus lenses and adding some of Bate’s method practices got me from 20/200 to 20/70. Because of this “fast result” I thought I would gain my vision in the matter of a few months so I wore a very low minus prescription and eventually I just stopped wearing the minus thinking it would speed my results even more.
If you ask for it, I will write another post on my journey since I started trying to recover from myopia. But for the sake of not making this a diary, I will just write about my negative experience ditching the minus so you can come up with your own conclusions, and SAVE TIME.
I follow the program and wear a normalized prescription now, but this is what happens (at least, from my experience) when you just stop wearing minus glasses all together, especially if you are anywhere above -1.75:
1. You start having a lot of very awkward moments:
You might have had those experiences where you don’t have your glasses on for some reason, and you can see that there might be someone around but you can’t really tell who they are. Well, this was me 24/7. Every single day.
I would be walking in school or at the mall or anywhere really and I would maybe find someone that I know. Then, they would maybe say hi to me or something. But… it wasn’t until they were a few meters away that I could finally tell who they were and then notice they were saying hi to me. Sometimes, I didn’t know what to do. Explain that I was not wearing my glasses and couldn’t see them? Pretend I was just not paying attention before and say hi when they got close? It sucked. I started to just want to avoid people until someday I somehow “get my vision back.” I just laugh now. Really. It was awkward and pathetic…
…or those other times when someone would point something out to me in the distance and I could barely see what it was but instead of having to explain that I couldn’t see because I didn’t wear my glasses, I would just pretend I could see it. Because in my mind I was like: I can see it, it’s just that it’s blurry. Now I realize how much I was missing out, which brings me to my second point.
2. You start thinking blur is normal:
Say someone would tell me to look at a squirrel that was just standing still in a field. In my mind I thought I could see the squirrel. I mean I could see the eyes… kinda. Those black circles located in its head right? And I could see its body… I guess. Now, that I wear glasses I’m like, maaaaaan, squirrels have tails! Well not really like that, but I can see the color of their eyes, their fur, predict their movements, see exactly how they hold to trees and stuff. I was missing out on those things.
3. You actually miss out on a lot of things in life:
It’s impressive how much our eyes let us experience life although they don’t touch anything around us. The squirrel, after I stopped seeing clearly, was just another animal. Now, it’s still an animal, but it’s unique. It’s different than every other animal; it has characteristics that make it different to a rat, a dog, a cat, etc. I like that; I like how much I can discover now.
Before, I would visit new places, have new experiences, see new faces but at the end of the day everything seemed kind of the same. Blurry settings, blurry lights, blurry people, blurry whatever-it-is. I kinda regret not having had my glasses then. There are so any things I did in the past two years that I did not get to live to the fullest because I thought that minus glasses were the “enemy.” Now that I use the minus glasses as tools to regress myopia, I discover new things, I enjoy new moments… and I remember them too: which is another point.
4. Your memory could become fuzzy:
I don’t know how exactly memory and eyesight are related but let me tell you this: when I lived in the blur it was harder to remember things. Every day was blurry. I was just waiting to somehow “magically” get my eyesight back (maybe, I thought, after all the time wearing plus lenses, print pushing, and doing eye rotations, my eyes would finally decide to cooperate and let me see). I didn’t have “time”, or really the ability to see details around me… let alone remember them. That also led to some anxiety and depression, in a guy that had never been anxious and was usually happy most of the time.
5. It becomes harder to differentiate between blur and clearness:
There came a point, after almost two years of working with my eyesight that I started wondering how things look liked before. I eventually went to an optometrist, but I had become so good at guessing letters out of the blur that when I got a pair of glasses from him I was still wondering if that was my actual prescription or I had just guessed the letter really good. I started getting some anxiety thinking what if I never really get to see well because my brain has decided blur is normal? What if I get stuck with blur even when wearing a full prescription? How did things really look like before? Will I ever be able to remember or see them that way again? I’m glad I can tell you now that those thoughts where just anxious thoughts, although they seemed like a reality. I’m wearing a normalized prescription, after a second visit to the optometrist that got me a real full prescription which I decided to lower to a normalized after really following the first thirty days of the program.
Also, at the beginning of my journey I would write posts saying that I was able to see the 20/40 or 20/50 line. I was not lying; at least I wasn’t because I didn’t know that I was. I thought I could see the 20/40 line because I was able to kind of guess the letters on the chart, but in reality that’s not 20/40 vision. This is why we need the centimeter calculator along the Snellen. Centimeters and meter are sometimes better at telling you where your eyesight is, so when you wear a normalized prescription you know it actually gives you real 20/30 – 20/40 vision. Whereas just basing your measurements on the Snellen can be useless if you don’t correctly distinguish blur from clear 20/20 vision.
Well, I could keep going with more reasons, and I will if you ask me to. But let those points I wrote really sink in. Think about it. I pretty much missed two whole years of my life thinking I was doing myself a favor by not wearing minus glasses. Thinking that I was “speeding” up my progress. In two years, with good eye habits and following the recommendation of Alex I could have maybe been enjoying 20/20 vision today. But as you may realize, I’m stubborn. Thank God I am, because I still feel motivated. I accept it was my errors and mistakes that did not allow me to recover, not that nothing out there works. I can now use my mistakes so you can benefit from them. Hopefully you will.
Take things that Alex, Jake, Neha or whoever writes the articles seriously. Forget the other stuff you’ve learned before, unless it really makes sense to add them to this website’s method. Do yourself a favor: even allowing yourself to be creative and taking a leap of faith, always think rationally.
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If you have forum access, the original post is here.
It’s not like we haven’t said it a million times in the blog. But it certainly bears repeating, being that it’s crazy town (aka the Internet) all around us.
Prescriptions aren’t toys. Know what you’re doing.
Cheers,
– Jake
And also … third session including video and audio tracks is uploading right now.
At this point the general public “always on” sign-up is probably a thing of the past, forever.
The program is so full, I could do every session video in a clown suit and also only have sign-up open for three minutes every full moon .. and it’d probably still be at full capacity. Apparently many of you recognize the value of it.
Although, there’s always a whiny contingent in my e-mail complaining about the price. I do empathize, lots of times I wish great things were ever cheap. Life .. what can you do.
