A Contact to the Brain

A Contact to the Brain

I struggle with normal repetitive tasks: brushing my teeth, combing my hair, keeping a clean room. As I head to bed, I always think "I'll do it in a minute" to only open my eyes, click my phone, and see a big seven across it. What is my greatest, and possibly most dangerous failure in this area is contact usage. My eyes are bad. I do not have contacts in writing this, and to see my computer screen I am maximally zoomed in, around six words per line, and still need to squint. For those who have a prescription, my left eye is negative five, and my right eye is negative 4.25. Now my horrendous contact usage comes from my usage of daily contacts in a weekly manner. To be more precise, I almost never take my contacts out, replacing them only when they naturally fall from my eye. I know what I am doing is stupid. I am at a distinct increased risk for eye infection with my constant wear. What most dangerously increases the risk of contagion is my choice to put back in contacts that fall out of my eye if I have no other contacts with me. In other issues, I decrease my eyes' oxygen flow through this constant wear. By wearing them to sleep, I never let my eyes rest. And yet, despite all of this known knowledge, I continue to wear the same pair of daily contacts, for as long as they last. Why I do this is habit and convenience. At this point, I have been wearing my daily contacts for extended periods, all my contact life. I do not have any other system in place. My contacts are strewn about the bathroom, the closet, my room, and my car. In some areas, I only have contacts for my right eye and others my left. I keep them in all these locations because that is my current system: I have no idea when I will lose a contact and so need to be ready always. This system garners its beginning in pure convince. The time it takes me to get up and out of my house in the morning is usually five to ten minutes after leaving bed. I do not eat breakfast, I try to do a quick brushing of my teeth and freshening up, but this is often too short, and I throw on the first shirt, pants, socks, and underwear I find. I get out of the house at a fantastic clip, and not putting in contacts only increases this speed. I know what I am doing is dangerous, and the scary part is, unless something terrible happens, I will continue to follow my status-quo. Without a scare or an actual event that shows me the consequences of my actions, I will never have the urge to change my ways. I think about it, contemplate it, but never take action on it. I sit here and wonder, and all I end up thinking is the risk is still low, and why change something that is convenient. The most interesting part of humanity is looking at those who fight for something better when the system in place is already all right versus those who value the safety of what they already have.