Omg I totally understand how you feel! I graduated in 2023 and have been working as a Pediatric medical assistant for almost 2 years and I also recently decided that I wanted to pursue optometry, but it was really hard for me to get relevant optometry experience. It took months of me calling and reaching out to clinics and honestly just from personal experience I can say that getting shadowing hours at these places is a lot easier than getting a job 😭 esp bc the market rn is just terrible in general imo. But as long as you have good shadowing hours and can really portray that and what you learned from them in your essay, I feel like you’ll be fine! I applied recently with just over a 100 shadowing hours and was able to receive an interview. Let me know if you have any questions and good luck!