When somebody finally looks properly at a thing they have been circling for years, the shock is not what they find. The shock is that all of it was in plain view the entire time. Nothing was concealed. Nobody lied about any of it. Every piece was sitting where it could be reached, for years, and it was walked past every single day without stopping.
Who stopped them from seeing? Nobody. Nobody except themselves. It kept being postponed, with the promise of looking into it later, that now was not the time, that there were more pressing matters requiring attention this month. And the postponement was not one decision that could be pointed at. It was thousands of small ones, each entirely reasonable on its own, adding up to a decade of living beside something that would not be examined.
That ignorance harms nobody but the person holding it, and that is the part worth being honest about. Years are genuinely lost and they are not coming back. And there is nobody to be angry with, which makes it considerably harder to put down than any wrong done by another person.
Blindness is a lot of work
We speak about not seeing as though it were something passive, as though the truth were simply out of range and might come into view if conditions improved. It is nothing of the kind. Keeping a thing unseen when it is directly in front of us takes continuous and considerable effort.
Certain conversations have to be avoided, which means knowing in advance which ones they are. Certain rooms have to be left at certain moments, with a reason ready. A particular thought must not be followed past a particular point, which requires noticing it approaching, which requires a kind of constant watching. There is a whole quiet machinery of avoidance running underneath an ordinary life, and it is expensive to operate, and the person operating it does not know they are operating anything.
That is why so many people are tired in a way that rest does not fix and doctors cannot find. Some of them are not ill and are not overworked in any way that shows on a schedule. They are simply working extremely hard at not knowing something, every day, without a break, for years.
Why it gets chosen
The reason is usually not cowardice, which is what everybody assumes when they look at somebody else's blindness. It is that seeing would require something. To see it clearly is to have to do something about it, and what would have to be done is very large, and nobody is ready. So the seeing gets postponed until readiness arrives, and readiness never arrives on its own, and nothing is being done to produce it.
Sometimes it is worse than that. Sometimes seeing would mean accepting that a great many years went into something that was not what it was believed to be. That is an extremely expensive thing to admit, and it gets more expensive the longer it has gone on, which is why the oldest of these are always the hardest to look at.
There are people who pray day and night and still cannot see what is directly in front of them, and it is not for lack of devotion or intelligence or sincerity. They have simply decided, somewhere well below the level of deciding, that this particular thing will not be looked at. And who stopped them? The same person who stops everybody, using the same reasonable arguments.
What happens when the looking finally happens
It is not pleasant and there is no point pretending otherwise. There is a period afterwards which is genuinely bad, in which somebody has to sit with the fact that it was there all along and that they knew, in some fashion, the whole time. Nobody enjoys meeting the version of themselves who arranged that, and there is no way to meet them briefly.
But the relief underneath is real, and it is not the relief of having solved anything, because usually nothing has been solved yet. It is the relief of no longer running the machinery. All the energy that was going into not knowing comes back at once, and it is a surprising amount, and most people have no idea it was being spent because they never had a day without the spending.
Those years were lost and it is honest to say so. Regret would require believing that the looking could have come sooner, and that is not at all certain. What can be accepted is the mistake, plainly, without dressing it up as a phase or a necessary part of some journey. There were eyes. It was directly in front of them. They chose not to look.
