I am the oldest of three siblings, and I have congenital myopia. Which means I am born very short-sighted, my first prescription when I was a baby was -16D, and I have worn glasses all my life.

For as long as I can remember, there are advantages associated with wearing glasses. When I was small one of my parents always used to put me to bed at night, took my glasses off for me, gave me cuddles before switching the lights off. In the morning, again either Mum or Dad would come to put my glasses on for me. It is the sort of attention that my brother and sister could only dream of, I knew I was special then.

Then my younger brother went for an eye test and was found to be quite short-sighted too. Naturally, he started wearing glasses and made our youngest sister extremely jealous. She complained bitterly about being left out and Mum had to buy her a pair of sunglasses to calm her down. From then on, I knew that glasses are fashion, and felt even more special after that.

When I became older, I learnt the trick of taking my glasses off myself when going to bed, and making sure I could find them again in the morning. I achieved this by putting my glasses in the front of the top drawer of the bedside cabinet. This is the most reliable place because the bedside cabinet is a large enough object for me to spot, and there is no danger of knocking my glasses off onto the floor while I am asleep (which happened on several occasions when I left them on the top of the cabinet).

Then school days were made special for me because of my eyesight. The others in my class were always interested in my glasses. Usually, they made nice comments about them that I enjoyed. Every year, the new arrivals in class would take turns to try my glasses on. When I am in the changing room getting ready for PE or swimming, there were always people offering to put Croakies on my glasses for me. I must have enjoyed more attention than most girls in the school.

A large number of people have asked how much I can see without my glasses, I don't mind that sort of questions nor do I take any offence because I can understand people being curious. Of course, there were bullies in the school who took it one stage further, grabbed my glasses and hid them for fun. I rarely got annoyed by such behaviour because my friend always got them back for me, and I am always showered by attention afterwards.

In fact, at some stage I developed the habit of deliberately taking my glasses off to clean them while certain boys were close by, because I always got them crowding around with comments like "Wow, Sarah, is this the real you?"

From quite early on in secondary school, I found out that there are boys who like girls in glasses, and most of them won't admit it. I have however learnt to recognise the tell tale signs. There was an occasion when I was struggling to put my Croakies on in the gym one of the boys in the soccer team came to volunteer his help. He put my Croakies on my glasses for me, but not before he tried my glasses on and looked around for a few seconds, he thought I couldn't see what he was doing. He then took my hand and put my glasses in my palm and said in a soft voice, "Here you are". I am sure he only wanted to hold my hand. In the end-of-year ball, he came over to me and asked if I could let him see 'the real me' again without my glasses. So I let him caringly lift my glasses off and indulge himself once more. That's after I explained to him that with my poor eyesight, and in case he ran away with my glasses, I had to grab hold of him (with both my arms round his biceps) and I have to keep him in focus all the time (for a high myope of around -21D at that time, the farthest distance I could focus was about 5 cm.)

Contact lenses? Well, I tried them for about 3 months and gave up. Life was becoming too boring with contacts.