WIDE EYES AND BLINDSIGHT

There is something exhausting about being looked at through eyes that are always searching for what is missing. Even when life feels whole enough to the person living it, someone else can stand outside of it and begin counting the spaces they believe should have been filled by now. A better job could have been more ideal, a quiet life could have been louder, a small beginning should somehow already resemble an arrival. Somehow, what exists becomes difficult to see because attention has already wandered towards what does not.

Perhaps this would hurt less if the eyes belonged to strangers.

There is a particular sadness in being misunderstood by people who believe they understand you deeply. Familiarity gives confidence to perception, and perception, when left unquestioned for long enough, begins to behave like truth. Someone remembers who you were, measures who you are against it, then quietly decides what you should be capable of becoming. Before long, you are standing beneath an expectation built from a version of yourself you did not create.

And comparison makes the experience even more unlively.

Another person’s life is brought into yours as evidence, their pace becomes a clock placed beside your own, their choices somehow become proof that yours require explanation. You begin to feel the heaviness of being observed, not because you are afraid of being seen, but because there is a difference between being seen and being interpreted, and sometimes interpretation leaves very little lively space for a person to simply be.

So the body works, stressfully, anxiously, almost apologetically, trying to make what looks like less become more. Not always because more is desired, but because there is a strange exhaustion in constantly having to prove that what another person calls little is not the entirety of you.

Sometimes I think the problem was never the work or self expression, if well examined. Perhaps it was the eyes, the windows of a mind battling cruel aridity.

For such eyes that begin from lack can arrive at abundance and still find something absent. It can stand before something beautiful and wonder why it is not more beautiful, hold something good and quietly compare its weight to what somebody else is holding. There is no arrival for such eyes because every destination contains another distance.

However, through deeper examination too, there is another way of seeing.

The mind drunk in conscious wonder, I think experiences and expresses with eyes full of creative curiosity. For what appears unfinished does not immediately become inadequate to such eyes, it can simply be unfinished. There is always room for expressive and experiential expansion, in the spaces such eyes creates through perception. There is room for something to become without being insulted for what it has not yet become. This mind is not naive, it sees what is missing, but it does not confuse absence with barrenness.

Perhaps that is why some eyes make us feel smaller while others somehow return us to ourselves.

There is a peculiar freedom in no longer rearranging yourself beneath another person’s gaze, in allowing your life to remain illegible to someone who has already decided how it should be read. Not rebellion, not indifference, just the quiet return to your own expression, where being does not have to defend itself while it is still becoming.

Maybe blindsight was never the inability to see.

Maybe it was having your eyes wide open, looking directly at something, perhaps even loving it, and still seeing only what you expected to find.

And somewhere beneath all that looking, something remains unseen.

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