A Sketch of Denial

Image credit: Photo by chandrika221 on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

There are certain moments in my life that I come back to, over and over, the way Monet came back to his waterlilies: trying to capture the way they look at just this moment, from just this perspective, in just this light. The moment I discovered my husband's addiction is one of those. I run the brush of my words over it again and again, painting it from a thousand different angles: the break between what I thought I knew and what I came to know.

I try to think of how I might explain it to someone who has never been there, how I might have explained it to the person I used to be, but it's always like saying, "Imagine you don't know everything you know" or "Imagine you know something that you don't know."  Imagine you don't know your hand is attached to your body or you don't understand that what goes up must come down.  Imagine what it's like to live on a planet that hasn't been discovered yet, whose climate and lifeforms and place in the universe we don't know.

I hear people refer to the place I came from -- the place I call the Matrix -- as "denial," and that single word seems so inadequate and misleading.  Listen to the water cooler conversations or read the tweets or listen to the callers on the radio shows, and you will hear women like me discussed: Hillary Clinton, Gayle Haggard, Silda Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, Elin Woods... "Come on, she must have known. What did she think was going on? She was in denial!" As if they all knew exactly what was going on, but chose to politely look away.  And maybe they did.  Maybe in some versions of the Matrix story, Neo is told he's living in a pod, but doesn't want to believe it.

But I was a child at a magic show.   I believed that I understood how the world worked and what the reasons were for what I saw: magic!  I believed the smoke and mirrors were real, believed the rabbit appeared out of thin air, believed it was possible to saw someone in half and put her back together again.  You can imagine what happens when one tries such things.  Tonight's canvas of Denial does not portray a woman pretending not to see the card she knows is up the sleeve, but a woman, dazed and baffled, holding a bloody saw over the person she cannot put back together again.