You Don't See It (All) Coming
Here is another rough draft, because I have been thinking again and I need to get the thought out somewhere the two of us can look at it.
We never see everything. Walk through a room without noticing what is on the floor and you can trip and get hurt. Psychologically, most of us do a version of this constantly. When a thought stings, forgetting it feels easier. When we have a flaw of our own, it is more comfortable to stare at someone else's. Gossip has to come from somewhere.
A real failure, or a fear that we are weak in some area that matters to us, can push a person to pour all their energy into a different place where the odds look better or the competition thinner. Families show this clearly. Picture an older sibling who is a star athlete or a straight-A student, and then a younger girl, pretty and athletic, who refuses to try out for cheerleading because her older sister or cousin did it and she decides she can never measure up. Is that honest self-knowledge, or is it the kind of pride that goes before a fall, with us talking ourselves into a corner?
Think about very gifted people whose talent turns into serious money. A lot of them never get competent help managing what they earn and drift into a sort of fantasy where none of that bookkeeping needs their attention. They hand the whole operation over to someone else while keeping the right to spend as they please. You can practically watch the wreck approaching. Freud had a name for these habits of dodging psychological pain: defense mechanisms. Projection, overcompensation, denial, repression, rationalization. They protect us, and they do it well, but they also block the road to a full and healthy life.
Say you lived somewhere with poisonous snakes and decided to believe they did not really exist in your region. That belief could set up a nasty surprise, especially if you traveled to a spot where the snakes are common and, being cold-blooded, came out to stretch in the warm sun on the very patch of ground you picked for your own sunbathing. Ignorance there is not bliss. Blame rhymes with shame, and shame is exactly what rises up when we do this to ourselves. People who have power over us, and others besides, use shaming to stop us from acting or to prod us into acting. It does not seem to accomplish much beyond frustrating what we actually want.
This often plays out like the story of the emperor's new clothes. The tailor convinced the emperor he was being dressed in cloth so fine that only truly special people could even see it, which meant only such people could wear it. The townspeople roared when the emperor paraded past in his new outfit and all anyone could make out was a man in his underclothes. What we take in through sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and whatever we then decide it means, is our perception. Turn off most of the lights at bedtime and you see nothing until your eyes adjust, and even then it comes mostly in black and white, blurrier than usual. That is a large part of why toddlers find monsters in the dark.
My little granddaughter stayed over last night and slept on the couch. She kept asking about a black thing in the corner and would not settle until I walked over and found it: a dark blue throw heaped on the floor beside Grandpa's recliner. She trusts me, and checking it with my own hands reassured her, so she fell asleep. Children are less foolish than we assume. They simply know fewer things than we do, and they assemble what they do know in an innocent way, but it holds together once you look from where they stand. Too often it feels quicker to brush a child off or hand them a tidy lie than to spend the time understanding the situation. The flat there are no monsters under the bed usually ends in the child's tears and the adult's frustration anyway.
So do we hide things from ourselves with these mechanisms, and do the hidden things circle back later to haunt us? Maybe seeing all of it is the better bargain, however uncomfortable the view. How many people never saw it coming when a partner asked for a divorce or started an affair? We do have to narrow our focus to get anything done, the way you lock onto a phone while driving, and that is precisely when we can fail, fatally, to notice the thing happening right beside us.