Blind Spots

Every mammal (along with reptiles, birds, amphibians, and many fish) has blind spots in their eyes. Our eyes compensate for our blind spots, so that most of the time, we don't even know we have these ocular dead zones. Our brain fills in the blanks with a continuum of light and pattern from the rest of our visual field.

We all have our own subconscious mental blind spots, as well--things about ourselves that we don't see and don't really need to see--unnoticed areas that we fill in with the patterns of the rest of our lives and what we believe about ourselves. Usually, we don't perceive that they're there until something breaks the pattern--often when we view an unexpected mirror of ourselves in others. That revealing mirror is held up to an aspect of ourselves that challenges our assumption of contiguous pattern and seamless coherence.

I became conscious of both of my blind spots (at least, 2 of them--are there more?! Oh dear, how would I know?) right around the same time recently. The first one occurred after a conversation I had with someone about the people we used to go to church with--way back when. Whatever happened to them? What were they doing now, these working class kids from a tiny-but-sincere group of strong Christians, my first introduction to evangelical-style religion, whose names I can still easily recall after all these yers, who gave me first glimpse into what it meant to be on a spiritual journey?

In a wave of nostalgia, I did the unthinkable: I looked them up on facebook; I found a few. I brielfy tinkered with the past, as I knew looking into their lives would challenge the safe memories of them, where they remain quaint, young, charmingly earnest in their church clothes, before wearing blue jeans to church was ok, before cell phone and internet and power point made church hip.

I did not request any of them as friends. It's not that I wouldn't like to see them again, to talk to them sometime. But to actually let them in--to the person I've become--the gulf seems too wide. And here's the blind spot: the fact that I don't use my real name on facebook, whereas virtually everyone else does, is to avoid situations exactly like this one. If I used my real name, maybe 1 of them would have found me by now, and then they all would've found me...the alias is not to keep pesky high school reunion people away after all. Rather, it protects the sense of self I have created, have carved out, keeps it separate from the one of 5, 10, 15, 20years ago. It's the assumption that others who knew me then but not now can't possibily understand how I'm a Bilbo Baggins in non-hobbit form...to explain how I got There and Back Again seems like a monumental task. And so, like Bilbo, I stay a little remote and prefer to write about my adventures on the side :)

The other blind spot involves not being completely honest with myself in the area of shutting a part of myself down. You hear, from time to time, confessions of how a person, a friend or family member maybe, walled off a part of themselves in light of an event. Usually it was due to emotional trauma, a sort of betrayal, or a contradiction that proved too big for the human mind. I always find confessions to such emotional deadening incredibly tragic--like the time a friend told me when he/she went off to war, they shut a part of themself off forever. I always thought I would never let this happen to me, no matter what.

It did--sort of. Although Esposo and I always wanted just one child, I have to admit that I suddenly realized that part of what reinforces that decision is the fact that after Himal's HLHS, I walled off the part of myself that would ever chance going through something like that again. Even if I were inclined to have another child (which I'm not), there is no way I would ever allow myself to experience even the possibility, however remote, of having another child with a heart condition. I took this fear, this anxiety, and put it in some locked place so that it feels completely separate from me now. It's like it's there, but it's in such a thick leaden box that even if it tries to cry out, I am completely deaf to it. When I think of it, I picture it as a cold little lead box on the right side of my heart...like my heart is beating, the rest of it is warm, but there's this cold icy lead thing there that doesn't feel. I will never have to deal with it, ever, because I cannot deal with it, I cannot even bear to think about it other than when it's in its safe prison.

So, I'm not superior in any way to those who build their defensive walls against love, friendship, selfless and heroic wide open leave it to chance expanse, after all.