a new lens

February 7, 2026

I recently got my first pair of progressive lenses. For those who don't know, they're eyeglass lenses that have multiple prescriptions to allow the wearer to see at various distances. They don't have any visible lines like bifocals or trifocals. They're wildly expensive, and despite my initial claims that I only needed glasses for reading at night, they've changed my life for the better.

I had never really felt like I needed glasses, so even making the eye appointment felt like a concession. My eye doctor told me that when humans turn 40, the "focusing system" in our eyes starts to break down, and if you've been powering through any vision problems, it can seem like you've suddenly developed poor vision. Anyway, long story short, I have been powering through an eye problem for goodness knows how long.

When I put on the new glasses, my long-standing motion sickness and dizziness resolved, my head tilt (another compensation behavior) went away, along with some neck and jaw tension that I would have never connected to needing vision correction. I'd just been living with the vague notion that I was falling apart and was developing agoraphobia (which is sometimes a symptom of the way my eyes were malfunctioning).

So my eyes and brain have been in an argument, and somehow these magical lenses have brokered a truce between them. I am still struggling with the feeling like I've lost some freedom -- I'll always need glasses now to function in the world. I've been thinking about this a lot.

I think what makes me uncomfortable about this is that I now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I have a variation that requires outside tooling (glasses and regular exams) to maintain my quality of life.

But lots of people need glasses, there's no reason to be ashamed or put out by it. We live in a world where we're expected to read things, and I need glasses to read. It's a simple accommodation, not a moral judgment.

I don't understand the utility of diagrams

I've also been thinking a lot about how my AI usage falls mainly into three categories: doing things I don't want to do, helping me learn things, or doing things I'm bad at, but don't have the motivation (internal or external) to improve.

One area I fall short in career-wise is creating graphs, charts, and diagrams. I am not a visual person. I do not have mental pictures, I struggle with visual metaphors, I am indifferent to screenshots, and I simply cannot understand diagrams and charts (unless they deal with physical realities like furniture assembly, Lego sets, car engine diagrams and so on). It's like I'm missing the mental module that can make sense of these things -- I can't go from abstract concept to visual representation and vice versa.

BUT -- I am a technical writer in the payments space. Diagrams and flowcharts are important to my readers. So, I used to dutifully slog through writing D2 or Mermaid diagrams using templates I found online. I don't have trouble describing the relationship between things in the Mermaid or D2 syntax, it's more that I don't understand what parts of a process, or a passage would benefit from the diagram.

When ChatGPT came out, one of the first things I tried it for was writing Mermaid diagrams. I could feed it a few paragraphs of text and ask it if there might a flowchart or a diagram hidden in there somewhere. It did a better job of discovering diagram candidates than me, and I haven't even attempted to write a diagram by hand since (although now I use Claude to write D2 diagrams).

where I'm going with all this

So my point is this -- is using Claude to cover my skill and talent deficits at work really any different than me needing to wear these glasses? Does this count as an accommodation? If I'm not supposed to feel bad about needing glasses, should I really feel bad that I need tooling to help me with diagrams? There's been a lot of talk lately about AI usage causing our skill atrophy, but what if you lack the underlying ability or "hardware" to develop the skill to begin with? What do we have to say about that?

So I've now got some more questions I want to think about:

• How critically do I need to think about where I'm using AI as an sort of cognitive prosthetic or accommodation for a disability?
• Do I stand to lose anything by using AI to make up for skills that I've never been able to develop?
• How do I know that I'm not deluding myself into using AI to do stuff that I could probably learn to do, I just find boring? Does it matter?
• If I didn't realize I needed glasses, but getting them addressed a lot of problems, then in what ways might I be using AI to create accommodations that I'm not even aware of? Is it even important for me to examine that?

But also, does any of this actually matter? I honestly just hate diagrams :)