Much like me, though I started wearing at age 8. Though my glasses are like trifocals, I usually peer over the top, or take them off altogether, to read from a few inches away. (I also have astigmatism and monocular diplopia in both eyes, and poor night vision. :smack:)
BTW, “short-sighted” is a Britishism and means “lacking foresight” to Americans, who use “nearsighted” for myopic.
Zombie.
I’m short sighted and have been wearing glasses since I was a pre-teen. I only wear them when I need to eg driving, or watching TV. If I’m walking into town I don’t wear them, but take them with me so I can see properly when I’m in the shops. I forgot to take them one day and managed okay without them.
For some reason I do wear them when I’m riding my horse - I’ve no idea why as I don’t really need to…
Yes, but it’s still quite fresh, for a zombie. Not even a year old yet. Barely smelly, and its shamble is more of a quick trot. Shame about the eyeballs, though…zombies with glasses just look silly.
(RickyG25x, we call old threads “zombies” around here. Some people don’t post in them, so we warn the old grumps when an old thread is resurrected, but really, it’s fine. Don’t sweat the jokes; we’re a snarky bunch.)
My eyes got dramatically worse every year from 1st grade until the end of high school, and then they slowed down a lot. An astounding lot. I have no idea why. Maybe it was because they didn’t like growing? Maybe because they’d just gotten nearly as bad as they were genetically programmed to get? No clue. Maybe one of the eye docs on the board (and I know we have at least one, who graduated sometime in the last year, because I remember the congratulations thread; just can’t remember his username) will know.
Anyhow…yes, I was around -10 near age 19, and now I think my worse eye is at -12.5 or so. Of course, I haven’t had them tested in 2 years, but I can still read my monitor, so they can’t have deteriorated that much further. Oh, and I’m 37 now. So I lost 10 (whatever units…diopters?) in about 12 years, and only 2.5 in the nearly 20 years since then. So don’t panic; yours will probably slow down, too.
As for the contacts…some people stop using them because they’re too much work, some people because their eyes start making protein deposits on the contacts that make everything gunky and blurry (my mom had to stop using her contacts because of the protein deposit thing. Even daily use of the enzyme protein cleaner didn’t work enough for her comfort.). Some people find that as the prescription goes up, contacts just don’t give them crisp vision - especially soft contacts.
I had to stop using my contacts for a long while, because they just hurt like the dickens. I’d get eyes that simultaneously felt dry and too teary, and white gunk like “sleepy dust” coated the lens and clouded my vision (maybe that was protein, like my mom? Don’t know.) Eventually, I couldn’t wear them for more than an hour or two before the discomfort had me reaching for my glasses, instead. I finally discovered that my eyes no longer liked the “all-in-one” solution (cleaner, soaker, wetter), and when I switched to a separate cleaner and soaker, the problem disappeared. Yay! But if I hadn’t figured that out, the discomfort and cloudy vision would have been my reason for stopping contacts.
Anyway, welcome to the board and all, and I hope you look around and see what there is to see! 
I’m nearsighted. Not by very much – just enough so that without corrective lenses, I tend to lean in a few inches to use a computer. I used to share an apartment with two other girls who were damn near blind without correction. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Likewise, in the apartment of the severely myopic and astigmatic, the roommate who could find her glasses without wearing her glasses was also in charge of finding everyone else’s glasses when they were lost. 
One roommate had eyes that were two very different degrees of bad, and couldn’t bring herself to poke lenses straight onto her corneas. The only time I ever saw her without her glasses was within a few minutes of her either getting up or going to bed. She wore her glasses into the bathroom for a shower and came out with them already in place, although I gather she didn’t wear them into the water. She told me she could tell her shampoo and conditioner apart by the color of the cap, and bought green-tinted shaving cream for her legs so she could use color blotches to tell where she’d gotten. There were still a lot of thudding noises when she showered; that roommate dropped things on a regular basis and was known to occasionally trip over thin air, so I don’t really know that it had anything to do with blindness.
The other roommate was up to about -12 when last I asked. She did have contacts, but she didn’t have eyeballs so much as she had misshapen eye-cubes, so they were something like $150 a box and had to be custom-ordered. (I also wear contacts. Mine are about $15/box online or off the shelf at the right optometrist’s office.) Her eyes have been terrible for as long as she can remember; when she was a kid, she thought trees really did look like the puffy pillow things in coloring books. She is a cross between a stone-cold genius and Gracie Allen, and can actually navigate the house, walk to the store, cook, watch TV, etc., without her lenses in – she’s learned how to tell people and animals and objects apart by the way they move, or don’t, and by the sounds they make. (The main tell that she didn’t have her lenses in, in fact, was that she didn’t walk around with headphones on like she did the rest of the time. She needed the noises to navigate.) Just about the only things she couldn’t do sans correction are read and drive. She owned glasses, but only wore them if she absolutely had to – they were horribly heavy and she hated not having peripheral vision.
Personally, I hate it when things are blurry, so I cope by wearing my contacts every waking moment. I wear disposable lenses, and as long as I remember not to get anything on my hands between the bathroom and the bedroom, I can just keep them in until I’m safely tucked under the covers. Then I peel them off and plink them straight into the wastebasket. I only have to shuffle to the bathroom for new ones when I get up in the morning.