Blinded by Guilt

Ellen Santasiero

Word Count 1994

When I was a senior in college, I thought I was going blind.

One day in January, my vision started to darken—it seemed a scrim made of tiny particles hung between me and the rest of the world—and so I traversed our windswept quad in upstate New York and signed in with jittery handwriting at the health center. I thought I knew why I was losing my vision: a month earlier, I had smoked some pot that pushed me through a thicket of hallucinations so terrifying I was afraid I’d done some permanent damage to my brain. When I got scared, I could be wildly irrational; two years earlier, after lying down with a boy I liked, just hugging and talking, I feared I was pregnant.

I felt scared about the pot incident because of how my father reacted when my brothers started partying as teenagers. He yelled. He punched a hole in the wall. He wandered the house weeping. Sharing his angst with our priest Father Allen each week brought him some solace, but it did nothing to make him less angry or sad. To prevent his wrath and disappointment, I did not try pot or alcohol until I was well out of his house. Now that I had, and was now probably going blind because of it, I would have to tell him. That thought blew through my mind icy as the January wind.

I told the doctor I thought I had the flu. He said he didn’t think so. Two weeks later, my eyesight still dim, I went back to see a different doctor who, after I recited my trouble, asked me if I was having sexual intercourse. When I said no, he looked me right in the eye.

“You’ve never had sexual intercourse?”

Was that weird? I had a boyfriend, Bill, but my father taught me that intercourse before marriage was wrong, and so we were waiting. We would have other kinds of sex, but afterward, I would cry with guilt.

I tried to carry on, but I was changed: My dim vision drove me, like a caged animal, from indoors to out, in search of the only thing that brought me relief: bright light. When I studied, I cranked my yellow, goose-necked lamp to within inches of my textbooks. At the health center again, I waited in the lobby with my toes clenched under the balls of my feet, my lower legs weak, my breathing shallow, and told yet another doctor, I couldn’t see, but he couldn’t diagnose me either.

After several weeks, the scrim in front of my eyes still hadn’t shifted. I took the bus home to see my parents’ ophthalmologist. On the bus, I glanced at the clock over the rearview mirror, dreading the time I would see my father at the bus station. At one of the stops, the doors opened to let passengers off and on, while I once again traced the catastrophic course of my logic: I took a drug that caused a serious condition, one that no one can diagnose, and this will ruin my father’s life. I looked out at the station’s cracked, oil-stained parking lot. The doors slapped shut.

When I got off the bus, I saw my father standing by his blue Ford Escort in his puffy beige jacket and thick boots. His blue eyes met mine. I knew he loved me, but I could not tell him how scared I felt, nor could I tell him about the incident with the pot. We had no history of speaking of such things.

At home, when I was growing up, what did we talk about? I strain to remember. My father did most of the talking, though, and he mostly talked about his opinions. The level of intensity with which he shared his opinions was matched only by the level of their austerity. News of drugs, fornication, long-haired men, or opinionated women provoked his derision or anger. Usually anger. I kept to his edges.

He had other opinions, too, ones we shared. He believed his children should spend summers in the mountains, and so he built us a cabin in the Adirondacks. He’d surprise us sometimes at night with a pizza sprinkled with golden olive oil. He taught me to drive in his navy blue Buick when I was fourteen. Somehow he trusted all eighty-four pounds of me to guide the massive vehicle on high-speed arterials near our home. In the car with me at the wheel, my father was the calmest I’d ever seen him. He’d sit back, rest his arm on the top of the bench seat, and whistle, giving me pointers from time to time. Once out of the car, though, his anxiety returned to DEFCON levels.

One time in the car, we passed a golf course

“Would you like to learn to play golf?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said, lying.

He must have heard hesitation in my voice because he then said something he never said to me before or since.

“You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to. You can tell me the truth.”

I could never tell him the truth.

Back at school, new symptoms developed, but I couldn’t tell my doctors the truth either. Shapes like big, gray, brightly-rimmed continents drifted in front of my eyes, blotting out whole pieces of the world. When scared or anxious, I saw people as paper cut-outs with spiked, silver auras. A neurologist I found in downtown Albany glued electrodes to my skull, taped my eyelids open, and blasted my eyes with a strobe. After a few weeks, word came back: normal.

In the spring, Randi took me to see the best eye doctor in New York City. In the car with her, moving towards Manhattan, where the good doctor was waiting to see me, I felt hope. I thought that this doctor would be able to find something the others hadn’t—a physical, rational cause, unrelated to the drug, of course, for my faltering eyesight. Never had I been so eager for a diagnosis of macular degeneration or stroke.

We took the Taconic Parkway, the trees in spring green witness to our journey. On the way down, I joked with Randi, but in the back of my mind lingered the memory of the night with the pot. I thought about how Randi had been with me in more ways than one that night. She had a bad reaction, too.

But now, three months later, I was with my friend, headed for the city doctor’s office. We stopped for the night at her parent’s apartment in the Bronx, where Randi’s mother had my favorite Entenmann’s chocolate donuts waiting for me. Over Christmas break, Randi had told her parents about our ordeal, just folded it into the dinner conversation. I couldn’t imagine it. The next morning, we drove into the city for my appointment.

I checked in. When it was my turn, I settled into the exam room.

The doctor was officious, running the same tests I’d had upstate. A half-hour later, he pronounced my vision perfect. Did I tell this new doctor I was afraid THC had damaged my brain in some way? Of course not.

I spent Easter weekend with Bill’s family in Vermont. On Saturday, we went to Our Lady of Seven Dolors for confession. Moving beneath the image of Mary with the seven swords piercing her breast, I entered the confession booth, kneeled, and submitted, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned …” Maybe it was the quiet, maybe it was those words, or maybe it was the memory of my father confiding in Father Allen weekly about my brothers, but I told the priest I had smoked marijuana and I couldn’t see and I was frightened.

Even though the priest wasn’t helpful, telling him emboldened me to tell a doctor my whole story. I made an appointment with a general physician back home. When I asked him if I could have done some damage to my eyesight by smoking that joint, he said he didn’t know. At least, though, I had started to speak.

Before the end of the semester, I shuffled once again to the campus health clinic. After I told a woman doctor the whole story, she read my chart, took one look at my hunched shoulders, and picked up the phone. She referred me to a psychiatrist downtown. I was not surprised, I was relieved rather, relieved that there was somewhere else for me to go, a place where someone would look beyond the physical structures of my eyes.

I tucked the paper she gave me with Dr. Levine’s address on it into my pocket. A visit to a psychiatrist, I thought. This, then, will be the cure.

During that first session, I spoke through nonstop tears. But I spoke. Once a week, for eight weeks, I spoke and spoke and spoke. I told the doctor about my dim vision, the night with the pot, the quest to many doctors, my straight A’s. I told him about my lifelong fear of my father, how angry he would be if he knew about the pot. I talked about trying so hard not to make any trouble for my father. He was tired. He was nervous. He was angry. He was obsessed with my brothers’ lives. He was troubled enough. How could I add one more thing to his burden?

I talked about things I’d never talked about before.

I talked about giving away drawings I’d done in art class, ones I loved of a ballerina tracing a tendu and another leaping, because I felt I wouldn’t be needing them anymore. I talked about my mother complaining that I never called her. About not having written in my journal since the day the cops came for my brother. Surprising my parents with out-sized panic when we were caught in a storm on a sailboat. My sudden inability to pass cars when I drove, certain such a move meant death, even when there were no oncoming cars in the other lane.

Over time, Dr. Levine’s questions, and his listening, soothed me. The creaking wooden floors, the caramel-colored light in his office, the carpet—everything was soft. Even the look of Dr. Levine’s brown wale corduroys and the lock of chestnut hair that fell in the middle of his forehead calmed me.

My time with Dr. Levine was only the beginning of the treatment I would receive over the course of the next forty years for depression and anxiety, which were, of course, the causes of the vision problem, not macular degeneration, not stroke, not street drugs. It would take years, but my eyesight would come back, the scrim would eventually lift. I could only afford eight sessions with Dr. Levine, but at least I had finally found the right kind of person to tell the truth to.

One of those sessions with Dr. Levine stood out.

I was talking about Bill that day. About Bill and me. About how we’d been together for three years. About how we hadn’t had intercourse yet, but did other sex acts for which I felt guilt.

“We’re not supposed to until we get married,” I said, looking down at a wadded-up tissue in my hands.

“It must be difficult to feel so much guilt when you really just want to be enjoying one another,” he said.

Enjoying one another?

Those words opened a door I didn’t think I could open—I scarcely knew that door existed—at least not then. My vision momentarily brightened, and I could see the scrim flutter a bit.

The scrim in front of my eyes would begin to lift not only when someone finally focused on its nonphysical causes. I also had to tell the truth. The important thing is that my life began to change, and change for the better, mostly because I had started to speak.

Ellen Santasiero has work forthcoming in Bull Men’s Fiction. Past writing appeared in The Sun, Northwest Review, The Stay Project, and in Going Green, an anthology from the University of Oklahoma Press. In 2021 she co-edited PLACED: An Encyclopedia of Central Oregon, Vol. 1. She is currently based in upstate New York and teaches at The Forge.