Eyeballs
When you struggle with eye contact, everyone fancies themselves the person with the power to change that.
Thanks, April from Marketing, random physical therapist, dude from OKCupid, but the problem lies in my amygdala and I don’t know that you’re qualified to go tinkering. No, staring deeply into your eyes for two minutes is not going to cure me of this affliction. It will, however, make me associate you with extreme discomfort, even pain, it will make me avoid you, and now look, here I go, out the door to find another job/physical therapist/moderately attractive date.
To grossly oversimplify, I am a traumatized person. Trauma occurred early and often in my formative years, and as a result, my amygdala, the fear center of the brain, processes eye contact as potential danger. I was born with the wiring for sensory processing issues. In the right (wrong) environment, these issues took hold, and now my amygdala is a little overbaked, a little too big and synapse-y.
This primitive part of my brain perceives eye contact as danger. Even if my college-educated, well-read, $40k worth of therapy brain knows, rationally, that there is no danger. The feeling of danger, conscious or unconscious, activates a fight or flight response. I flee by looking away from people’s eyes. Looking away gives respite, a moment of escape–from what seems effortless to most of the population, but can feel like staring into the mouth of a hungry tiger for me.
After looking away, the anxiety. Because I’m being weird and evasive and people are trying to make sense of the shifty eye-contact avoider in front of them. Then, the negative assumptions from the owner of the eyes I am avoiding. Finally, the sense of failure at this most essential part of human interaction.
There’s an assumption that all eye contact avoiders struggle with empathy. Quite the opposite. I grew up tuning into the adults in my chaotic home for any flicker of emotion that could spell danger. I am empathetic to an almost unbearable degree. If people’s emotions are water, then eye contact is a firehose. I must preserve myself, avoid drowning.
Imagine being modest. Feeling most yourself when wrapped in layers and layers of cloth. Now imagine that everywhere you go, people demand that you remove your layers, one after the other until you are standing naked before them. Only then, when you are utterly unprotected, will you not be perceived as rude, or aloof or unfeeling. This is my daily experience of the world.
At a bar with my husband’s coworkers and their wives, I inadvertently corner myself on a patio, next to a wife who has had too much red wine. “I think it’s really important that people look at me when I’m talking,” she slurs. “Eye contact is respectful.”
There’s no good way to explain you’re traumatized. Imagine going into every new environment prefacing, “you may notice I don’t make a lot of eye contact, but don’t worry, it’s because I was abused.” The mere mention of trauma makes others believe you are currently depressed, which is strange. I regard my trauma as an almost intrinsic part of myself, because it has physically manifested itself on my body. The wacky amygdala, the severe TMJ, the controversial pain disorder upon which doctors cannot agree. My body has kept the score and I stand here die-cast, a product of trauma.
Not being able to disclose this fundamental reality of my existence leads to frustration, particularly in the workplace. People take great offense when you avoid their eyes. (And–working theory–the dumber the person, the greater the offense taken.) I am a high achiever by nature, a fast learner, sailing through performance reviews, except of course, for the eye contact thing, which is usually sandwiched in between compliments by my supervisors, as if I have reached 31 years old completely oblivious to the fact that I am neuro-atypical and should really fucking look up. There is no telling where I would be professionally, if not for this strange fact of my brain.
I’m in a caring profession. Again, with the surplus of empathy. Practice has reduced some of the fight or flight impulse as I work with patients, but really, I am creative, standing strategically away from people, handing them documents to read when they are looking at me too much, giving them a pair of dark glasses to slip on before their procedures. I joke with patients from the moment they arrive at our office, busying my hands and eyes with trays of instruments. I get through, with significant effort and compartmentalization. It helps that my work is meaningful, assisting doctors in a cancer hospital. I could not sustain this effort in almost any other setting.
I tried, for a while, to leave the caring professions. I learned welding, spending hundreds of hours in plywood and metal booths with a welding hood on, focused intently on a torch, on the satisfying crunch of fire biting metal. I worked in a shipyard, ass up, head down welding, one of the smallest people in the yard, relegated to welding the claustrophobic cubbies of beautiful aluminum boats. I thought eye contact wouldn’t matter there, how could it, to people in full welding gear, speed glass obscuring their eyes. This notion crumbled for me the day my boss pulled me into a meeting with his boss, demanding to know why I was disrespecting him all the time by not looking him in the eyes. (Also demanding why I couldn’t just give him a little smile every now and again.) This meeting, which left me heaving in tears in front of men with the emotional intelligence of sheet metal, was the beginning of the end for my welding career. I don’t recommend crying in a shipyard. It makes the metal dust on your face run into your eyes and also people never forget it.
Ideas: wallet-sized brain diagrams, business cards with explanations of PTSD and its impact on the brain, bold italic at the bottom: But I’m ok now, LOL. A trauma talent show, wherein participants demonstrate our favorite coping mechanisms. I can do a really dark stand-up comedy set about how my dad was both a MENSA genius and a crack addict while demonstrating how to paper mache a pinata shaped like a tablet of Wellbutrin.
No one wants to change this lack of eye contact more than I do. I have titrated my way up and down the SSRI highway to no avail, seen therapists and specialists with the explicit goal of fixing my “eye contact thing”. The only thing that has helped reduce my eye contact avoidance is time and familiarity. I can now look at my husband and at my friend of over a decade without much effort.
Realizing that I could look at them, finally, without the anxiety of a prey animal was a joyous event, followed by a wave of sadness. Painful, to think that this comfort, the product of years of trust building, is automatic for other people. That I must work hard, every moment, to achieve what others do unconsciously.
“Look up and you will see kindness,” a therapist once told me. “Practice in low stakes situations, with clerks at the grocery store.” I do this now, most of the time, if only to not seem like a total asshole to retail staff. It’s true, of course, that there is kindness on the face of strangers. Even that kindness proves overwhelming to my brain. Maintaining focus is hard when a visual stream of information is thrown in, especially a human face, with all of the micro expressions and eyeballs. I survived childhood by retreating into myself, the way many people do. The kindness on other people’s faces demands that I step down from my mental watchtower now, rung by rung, to join others on the ground below. The connection is at times too much. In my arsenal, countless ways to cope with cruelty, and only a handful to process kindness.
My life is really good now, I feel obligated to say this much, to make people comfortable with my trauma. I have avoided the usual fate of most traumatized people. I live in a beautiful apartment overlooking the water, with my eternally supportive husband and a rescue dog. My therapist’s office is literally across the street. I have health insurance, which has allowed me full workups on all the parts of my body that were impacted by trauma, all of the aching joints and clenched teeth.
I am not sad. Not beyond the usual existential sadness, not beyond the awareness that life is cruel. As Margaret Atwood wrote, “All observations of life are harsh, because life is.” Yes, I am Fucked Up, probably irrevocably. I would feel more peace if people could simply leave that fact alone, rather than tugging at the edges of my vision, crouching to find my eyes, accosting me on patios with demands that I change my brain, on the spot, to look into their eyes.
I feel most normal in a car, facing forward, staring at the horizon listening to others talk, or walking down the sidewalk next to a friend, two brains strolling along, nothing for my eyes to evaluate but the path forward. My dog is 11 now and has taken to staring into my eyes in a sort of elderly dog telepathy. Feed me, pet my head, let’s go walk. I stare back into his eyes, where there is no scrutiny, no question of what is wrong with me, or who did what to me or why. Lingering in that gaze, I am whole, understood, overactive amygdala at peace.
An update, in 2024:
Since writing this piece in late 2019, the world has ended and begun again. I moved out of the caring professions and into tech, working remotely, all meetings happening on Zoom. I have not heard a word about my eye contact in over four years. I’ve been promoted. My earnings have more than doubled. I am an accepted and well-liked member of a large team.
I did not change. The world happened to change in a way that accommodates my neurological difference. While the pandemic was deeply scarring to millions of people, there are those like me who emerged into a new reality where, for the first time, we don’t experience society as a series of tiny, daily torments. I want this for everyone. I lament that it took a novel virus unleashed on the world for us to shed unnecessary and oppressive social norms. I see those who are attempting to cleave back remote work, effectively, to end inclusion of certain neurotypes in the workplace. I wonder if they know what will be lost, I wonder how to quantify it in a way they can understand.
I wonder if they would care.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Essays | Back to Volume 18, Issue 1 – Summer 2024
About the Author
Carly Pedersen is a Mexican-American memoirist living in a small town in Washington. In January 2020, Carly received a fellowship to the Key West Literary Seminar. Their work has appeared in the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism.