Checking my blind spot

I had just returned to New York after visiting my folks in Nebraska. Mother was finishing up radiation treatments for a small, cancerous tumor in her breast. My father once again implied I should live nearby where I could take care of them if it came to that. I love being of the land, but growing up on that farm was uniquely terrible at times. Staying would have killed me. Going back drains my spirit.

I left after five days to seek the company of friends. When I was finally back in my apartment alone, my mind slipped into that unholy sinkhole where being alive felt like too much work. It wasn't my first time. I knew I'd crawl out again and regain a sense of wonder at the creative miracle of existence. In the meantime, there I sat, a successful, fairly sleek-looking female in an Upper West Side apartment, musing for just a split second about shedding my body and being done with it.

Now after years of dissecting my own personality and everyone else's, I have a pretty good idea that soul sickness comes from things we can't see in ourselves. Just as we collectively couldn't accept a sudden revelation that the planet was round, neither can we individually bear sudden disclosures that we are not what we think we are. And so it is, the more lies, traumas and secrets we are subjected to as children, the longer it takes for those pieces of poison to exit our souls. Often I have felt purged, only to have another fragment of some long-buried shrapnel rise like a boil through the layers of my awareness.

So I called Michael and asked him what was in my blind spot.

I knew it wasn't huge enough to leave me catatonic. I'd already remembered every contorted, abusive episode from my youth and long ago recounted them to curious and slavering psychologists for whom reliving one's terror is considered "therapy." I had, for the most part, made peace with those involved.

So I called Michael, although the obstruction was probably obvious. Typically, what we can't see in ourselves appears to the rest of humanity like a neon sandwich board, but few have the stomach for psychological bomb-dropping. Michael is surgically adept.

"You don't let yourself be happy," he said.

"No way," I thought. "Too simple...won't let myself be happy..."

Then I recognized the mind's way of deflecting what it would rather not acknowledge. "I asked him to tell me what he sees that I can't, so why don't I just consider his answer instead of rejecting it out of hand?"

Perhaps because he was right.

I'd come to accept happiness as transient, which was actually progress compared to the years I spent avoiding it completely. I'd learned from the fears of others and experiences of my own that life was hard, work prostrating and love tenuous and frequently twisted. Intellectually, I knew those things were true only if I accepted that kind of reality. But creating a new reality out of the imagination is like painting a Pieta with stick figure skills. Yet only if one never takes up the brush is the outcome certain.

A small gray squirrel plays on the branches outside of the window of my new home in Virginia. My mother is fine and probably dwelling on the latest great-grandchild in the family. Marcus is downstairs doing paperwork. I will marry him in June, fully expecting to experience this loving reverence with him for the rest of our lives. Slowly, but absolutely, my blind spot is becoming a landscape of color.

Monday, January 15, 2001

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.