Søren AasSeeing Is Not Knowing
Repurposing my coping mechanism
When I was a boy I told my father that I felt like I was always outside, looking in through a window. I don't remember what prompted it. I remember that he didn't quite know what to do with the remark, and that I filed it away as one of those odd things a child says and can't account for. It would be a long time before I understood that I hadn't been confused at all. I had been describing the most ordinary fact of my life, as plainly as I knew how.
The window was this. I was always watching myself. Not in a vain way — closer to the opposite. I watched the way you watch the road while driving: there was a version of me living the moment, and another version a half-step above it, monitoring, adjusting, checking the gauges. I assumed everyone operated this way, the way you assume everyone sees the same colors you do. It didn’t occur to me that the half-step was unusual, because I had nothing to compare it to. It was simply where I lived. A fish in water and all that.
It took other people to point it out, and they didn’t have a kind word for it. People who got close to me eventually used the same one: self-absorbed. For years I accepted the charge without really understanding it, because from the inside it didn’t feel like absorption in myself at all. I wasn’t admiring myself up there. I was keeping an eye on things. Only recently did I see that they were right about the symptom and wrong about the cause. It wasn’t self-absorption. It was self-observation — which to the other person lands in much the same way, as a sense that you are not quite in the room with them. But it does come from somewhere entirely. The narcissist is in the gallery because he finds the show magnificent. I was in the gallery because I had never figured out how to get down to my seat.
The reason I never figured it out is not dramatic. My mother was often low. My father traveled a great deal, and when he was home his mood set the temperature of the house. Neither of these things were optimal, but neither were they a catastrophe; plenty of people grew up with similar circumstances, some much worse. But a small child soon gets good at one thing, which is to know early which way the weather is turning. So I learned to read a face for the first sign of a downturn. I learned to read a room and find the move that kept things level. I looked through the window, and observed there first, before I acted. Watching was the most intelligent thing a child in my position could do.
That is the part I most want to get right: the watching was not a flaw. It was a good solution. It worked. It kept a small person steady in a situation he had no control over. If I could go back I would not tell him to stop. He was doing something clever, and it served him.
The trouble is he never switched the watching off.
There is a line I keep coming back to, because it holds the whole thing in a few words: my life changed, but the manual didn’t update. The conditions I had built myself for — the unpredictable weather, the need to stay a half-step above the moment — those conditions lifted, gradually and then almost entirely as the boy became a man. But the system kept running exactly as before. It went on scanning rooms that held no threat. It went on reading the faces of people who were simply glad to see me. It behaved like a sentry still walking the wall of a country that has been at peace for decades, because nobody ever told him the war was over, and walking the wall was the thing he knew how to do. And he was exceptionally good at it.
You can watch the manual run in places that have nothing to do with childhood. I chose a career in project management, which is, when you look at it honestly, the watching turned into a profession: survey the whole landscape, anticipate every risk, arrange the variables so that nothing bad is allowed to land. I was good at it too, and it nearly finished me, because I wasn’t doing a job so much as running the old vigilance at scale, with budgets standing in for moods. The same instinct showed up in how I loved, too — as a kind of attentive over-management, a giving and anticipating that was easier than the more exposed thing of simply needing someone and letting them see it. None of this felt like a wound expressing itself. It felt like my personality. That is what an old adaptation feels like from the inside. It doesn’t announce itself. It just feels like you.
What changed recently was not that I found new information about any of this. I had all the pieces already — the window, the comments, the burnout, the way I loved. What changed is that they fell into a single shape, the way scattered facts will sometimes suddenly resolve into one picture, and I understood that they had never been separate problems. They were one thing, seen from different angles.
And here is the part that genuinely surprised me. The faculty that had kept me up at the window all those years — the watching — was the very same faculty now letting me see all this clearly. Years of monitoring for danger had, without my noticing, become an unusual capacity for sight. The instrument was the same. I had only ever used it for threat detection, because that was what the room had required. Once the room was safe enough, I could turn it the other way, toward understanding. And it worked. The thing that had trapped me was the thing now showing me the way out.
It is tempting to round this off into something neat — that the wound contained its own cure, that the injury was secretly a gift. I don’t believe that. What the wound produced was not a cure but a capability — the watching itself — and a capability is neutral. The wound didn’t shape the instrument; it only decided what the instrument was first used for. Mine was put to threat detection, because that was what the boy required. Seeing that — seeing the watching as a capability I had built rather than a defect I was stuck with — was what finally let me stop fighting it. That turned out to be the whole hinge. Once I understood the watcher was a tool, I could see that threat detection was only one of the things it was good for. The change in perspective didn’t heal anything. What it did was free the energy I had been spending on threat detection and make it available for directions I could actually choose.
Which is the last thing, and the reason for the title.
Seeing all of this clearly felt, for a while, like arrival. It was lucid and complete; I could lay out the whole machine and name every part. But clear sight, I’ve come to think, is still the watcher’s own country. It is a higher window, and a kinder one, with a much better view — but it is a window all the same. I was still up there, looking in, even as what I looked at was finally myself, finally in focus.
The healing, whatever it turns out to be, is not up there. It is in the part that can’t be observed, only undergone. I find the early traces of it in plain, wordless places — walking on bare ground and feeling the actual texture of it underfoot, in the body practices I took up almost by instinct before I could have told you why I was drawn to them. They have one thing in common: there is nothing in them to narrate. There is only something to feel. The watcher cannot operate there, because watching runs on language and anticipation, and the body, fully inhabited, runs on neither. You can’t think your way down out of the gallery. You can, it turns out, occasionally feel your way down — one footstep, one breath at a time — and in those moments I am not watching at all, because I am too far inside the thing to climb above it.
So the instrument got me all the way to the threshold of myself. It showed me the door with great precision. And then it reached the edge of what it could do, because the door is one it cannot walk through. The last steps are not the watcher’s to take. They belong to the body, and to whatever it is that happens when, for a moment, you forget to keep an eye on yourself.
The wound made a watcher of me, and the watcher, in the end, made a seer. That is the gift, and also its limit. Because seeing is not knowing — I watched myself for thirty years without understanding any of it — and knowing, I have finally learned, is not healing. I’ll let you know if I ever find out what that is.