Writing the Senses: Sight

In this five-part column, Hannah Howard explores the senses from a craft perspective

I’ve been procrastinating writing about this sense. Sight feels tricky. Sight gets a bad rap, mostly in the context of a focus on appearance being superficial:

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Beauty is only skin-deep.

Love is blind.

The way someone or something looks only tells a small part of the story, or so we are told. I had a friend in high school, an arty, annoyingly cool person whom I admired. She offhandedly said one day, “I don’t care what I do as long as I look great doing it.” It was tongue-in-cheek (I think!), but that comment stuck with me for both its absurdity and the weird kernel of truth it contained.

After all, we live in an image-obsessed world. A scroll through Instagram is a journey through snapshots, two-dimensional squares of people’s three-dimensional lives. When we write, it’s natural to start with how our characters look, the faces and bodies they take with them into their worlds. For most of us, the first thing we do when we see somebody is see them. Sight gets a lot of play on and off the page.

I spent my teens and early twenties battling an eating disorder. During this time, I mostly avoided mirrors at all costs; whatever I happened to observe there could not possibly be good enough. During my sickness and my recovery, I lost and gained and lost and gained weight many times over. It didn’t seem to matter; whatever the scale told me was unacceptable.

“My eyes are broken” is a phrase I first heard in my eating disorder recovery group. Then I heard it again and again. At first, I didn’t get it.

And then one day, I check out the mirror and smile. I look good. My lips are glossed, my hair is bouncy clean, my blue blouse gossamer and flowy. I go out into the world feeling confident. An hour later, I’m looking in the bathroom mirror and I am someone else. I have transformed. My skin is sallow and my eyes are overcast; my hair is stringy. The lip gloss has turned clumpy and peels off my lips in scabby flakes. The blouse tugs unflatteringly at my stomach. I am a monster. Pretty one minute, hideous the next. I get it. My eyes are broken.

Photos punish even more than mirrors. In the mirror, I can twist and turn myself until it’s bearable. I can walk away. Pictures are set. I’m stuck there, in the shot, on someone’s sister’s phone (if it’s mine, I am fast with my thumb on delete) or, worse, on social media. Usually, my eyes are so squinty they are closed and my forehead shines as if I’ve just been caught in a downpour. My arms often perform a cruel trick where they squish into my side and thus unfurl into multiple arms. My hair looks hard as armor, or greasy as fast food, or, somehow, both.

A couple of years ago, I was having one of those supremely good days. I went to a lecture in Long Island City by Dr. Paul Kindstedt called “Survival, Prosperity and Meaning: Glimpses into 10,000 Years of Cheese and Humanity.” It was enlightening, and we ate the best Gouda I have ever had, sweet as butterscotch and studded with crystals. Dr. Kindstedt is a cheese crystallographer, and he riffed on those crystals. Afterward, I got an Uber from LIC to Bushwick, and out the window on the BQE I caught one of those sunsets that could break the heart of even the most jaded New Yorker. I am obviously unjaded and I nearly cried.

I schlepped up five flights of stairs to the Bushwick rooftop where I was going to watch Where the Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze movie based on the Maurice Sendak book that was my favorite nighttime story for ages, with some friends and Tony, my then boyfriend, now husband. These friends met Tony for the first time. Everyone hugged everyone. Beyond the rooftop, the sun did a final dip behind the impossibly majestic Manhattan skyline. The breeze whistled and I thought, How did I get so lucky?

Before the movie, my friend suggested we take a picture with the sunset-washed skyline in the background. “Sure,” I said, trying to be cooperative, to get over my photophobia. My arm around her arm. The wind playing with our jackets, our hair. Tony snapped the shot.

I knew I shouldn’t look, but she looked, and she leaned over to show me. It was everything I feared. She looked like a pretty woman, her smile vivid, her body like a pretty woman’s body, curvy yet slender. As for me, I was some other species, like the friendly beasts from Where the Wild Things Are: bulbous, lumpy, hulking. My head was too big, but my body was bigger. There was a pillow where my stomach was supposed to be, stuffed haphazardly. My jeans, my favorite jeans, encased my legs like sausages. My arm did its evil arm thing.

The glimpse of the photo crushed me and my joyful mood. I looked away fast, but still I felt punched. The punched feeling was familiar, and its familiarity made it worse.

I feel defensive even as I write this. That the way I look, or think I look, has such power over me still feels shameful, nearly ten years into recovery. I’m embarrassed about the superficialness. I hate that my photo/body baggage gets in the way of gorgeous nights with people I love. I long to be above it. Way above it. And yet. I know I am not alone in this frustration. I want to be kind, and smart, and make people feel uplifted, and so many other things, but I also want to be beautiful. There it is. Every time, these pictures feel like failure.

Thankfully, ten years in recovery has given me some tools. One of them is don’t go down the rabbit hole of self-loathing. (Perhaps I’ve already gone, but I try not to linger there.) Another is to return to the present moment, in life and in my writing.

When I’m writing, I try to channel my recovery eyes, which are curious and loving, rather than my eating disorder eyes, which are small-minded and mean. I want to tap into that scared, small, frustratingly familiar way of seeing the world only when it serves my story, perhaps to channel a struggling character (sometimes that struggling character is me).

When I’m writing, I try to channel my recovery eyes, which are curious and loving.

Here’s a prompt I love: Envision a red barn. Write about that barn. What do you see in your mind’s eye? Now describe that red barn from the point of view of a character who has just fallen head over heels in love. Then, depict the very same barn from the point of view of someone who is heartbroken.

The barn looks different, right? But how do we find the right words for that difference, the sunny glow of infatuation or the moody cloud of despair? Writing about sight is challenging because what we see depends on where we stand and who we are.

Our first impulse as writers is often to chronicle how something or someone looks. While a photographer can show us an entire scene at once, a writer has to choose what details to include and, just as importantly, which to leave out. Sure, the sky may be blue. You can invoke this by naming a color (periwinkle!) or by using a color metaphor: blue as the farmers market blueberries in July. Or maybe what is more interesting is the way the light bounces off a window, making it iridescent. Or the way the sun shines relentlessly, but your character only sees heaviness through the dark shades of her sadness.

After the movie, we sat outside at Roberta’s and laughed so hard I had to wipe IPA from my nose. We hugged goodbye like we meant it. I saw it in their eyes, too, that thing I might never find in a snapshot, that beauty that erupted in our laughter, tears, long stories, late nights, and weird jokes and not in our arms or our hair. And I felt it: beautiful.

When those little squares on Instagram can’t capture the full experience in all its complexity, our words can.

Sight may be surface level, by definition, but it can be the start to something profound.