voluntary distortion

seeing the world through wavy glass

Sometimes the whole getting less than five hours of sleep because books are more important thing catches up with me, and I get a little punchy. I walk around lightheaded, with a brain that doesn’t quite function at the proper level.

Like last night. I was falling asleep on my feet, and finally figured out it was because I had stayed up late the night before reading books about snarky gay vampires. (Thanks, Alice Winters!) But—news to me—unlike them, I am not immortal. Worse, when I get really tired, my cognitive processes slow. Quelle surprise.

(Sometimes slow cognitive processes makes for pretty good writing because my inhibitions are lowered. Just saying.)

What’s been happening is when I get tired, my eyesight feels funny, too, and I rely on my reading glasses, rather than the milder glasses I wear most of the time.

I know this is earthshattering. Stay with me.

But when I take my glasses off, between the tired me and eyes becoming accustomed to stronger glasses, it looks like I’m seeing the world through wavy glass, even if none of it is present. Even if I rub my eyes.

(Which I don’t do, OBVS, because we’re not supposed to touch our faces these days.)

Here’s the thing—I have wavy glass throughout the windows of my 1913 Craftsman house. Many of the panes are over a hundred years old, with ripples and pockmarks in the glass, making it so the purple jacarandas outside look painted by Monet, with or without my spectacles.

Note to self: never call them spectacles again.

Apparently, the wave in my window glass is caused by the method of creation rather than glass shifting downward over time, which was my previous belief. I’d thought because sand was apparently liquid when it’s heated into glass, over time it moves. Google corrected me just now.

Google also told me one can get reproduction vintage window glass based on the “level of distortion” one desires.

So that interests me, and that’s where I’m going with this.

You can decide the level of distortion through which you want to see the world.

Think about that.

You can pick how clearly you want to see the truth.

It seems to me most of the time, or at least until we start a journey of self-exploration, we don’t have a choice. The distortion we experience in the way we view the world is inevitable. It’s unconscious or subconscious or nonconscious, but it’s there. We can only see the world through our own lenses, ones built of experience and education and conditioning and our own personalities and whatever else goes into making the wavy glass.

It seems the process of my whole life is figuring out what distortions I have and learning how to remove them. I’m addicted to the clarity I feel after discovering some bent or prejudice or untruth or paradigm I have and letting myself see the world without it.

But the distortion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Looking through the wavy glass is looking at a pretty picture. It’s art. And I can paint the environment I’m in, simply by choosing the lens through which I see the world.

What level of distortion do you want?