Sway: From Out of Sight Encounters to Hypervigilance

I probably don't recognize you when I see you from a distance. I ran into someone the other day and they waved to me. I waved back. We almost went on our way and then our paths got closer. They decided to walk up to me and they were laughing because they realized I didn't know who they were when they first waved at me. What I didn't tell them is that I couldn't see who they were because they were too far away. How far? Maybe a few hundred feet (I don't have depth perception so it could have been 30 feet). This happens to me all the time and people generally don't know that I can't see as well as they think. “It's just that demon life has got me in its sway” (The Rolling Stones, Sway). 

My eyesight has unfortunately been the cause of many miscommunications. One time I walked up to team members and asked, “What's going on here?” They were taken aback and put off at first until they realized the question wasn't a challenge. I couldn't see the extent of a reorganization project they were working on and was asking them to describe what I was looking at so that I understood it. So not only could I not see what I needed to see, I had to smooth unnecessary tensions with team members. 

My dad would regularly point out things he wanted me to see and I wouldn't see what he was talking about a lot, to the point he'd get frustrated because he just thought I wasn't listening to him. He'd say something like, “look over there” and he was my dad so I wasn't always going to say, “Dad, I don't know what you're fucking looking at.”

Usually, these moments happen quickly and I don't have time to explain what I can and can't see. “Well, all the blues had a baby and they named the baby rock and roll” (Muddy Waters, The Blues had a Baby and they Named it Rock and Roll). Like, when I annoy my wife while she's driving and I ask her if she saw a nearby pedestrian. She always does, which is why she gets annoyed with the question. I don't see them until the car is too close and I ask because I hope she did. It's a good thing I'm not driving the car. 

It's not that I can't see, I just can't see depth and my distance isn't great. And, if I don't see you at all, you're bound to hit my startle reflex that's overactive (except for a brief period in high school where a peer trained me not to react). Why doesn't everyone pick up on this? Thanks to my trauma experience, I'm hypervigilant. My physical experience and my internal experience occasionally balance each other. Granted, it comes at the cost of feeling unsafe so it's not necessarily a tool I want. 

My current team members experience this daily. I'll be at my desk working. They will say something to one another or have a patron transaction that prompts an almost automatic response from me. I'm a supervisor so that alertness comes in handy but it's a deeply honed trauma response. To borrow a phrase from the comedian Christopher Titus, I needed to know when to step out from behind the fan before the shit hit it (that's from Norman Rockwell is Bleeding. Disclaimer for anyone who checks out that comedy, it's trauma based comedy; which I love because it's relatable for me, but it might be uneasy for some).

There's no rhyme or reason to what I notice and what I don't. There's no correlation to what hypervigilance catches that my sight misses. Why don't I point either of these things out to people? It's difficult. Sometimes, it'd be like telling you I took a breath every time I do it. Sometimes, I'm embarrassed that I don't recognize you and don't want to point that out. Here's the thing I want people to know about my distance vision and my hypervigilance, how I respond to you because of those things doesn't always land the way I want it to. 

When I'm in a meeting and see something out of the corner of my eye that distracts me, it doesn't mean I wasn't paying attention to you. I'm in two spaces all the time. What's happening in front of me and what's happening around me. It's great for customer service because I can be talking to colleagues and immediately pivot to the customer because I was watching their approach while having a conversation. It's not always great for interpersonal interactions.