It’s just my thing | JillSusan.com

By Frank Bruni

It happens almost every day: A friend, an acquaintance or a complete stranger confides in me about a past struggle that only a few people in his or her life are privy to, about physical pain or emotional turmoil that almost nobody sees.

It happened just the other day. Someone who’d always struck me as a portrait of unflappable confidence and unforced buoyancy told me for the first time about a medical misfortune that he suffered decades ago and repercussions from it that linger.

I was surprised by the details of his hardship but not by the fact of it. His story is my story. My story is many people’s stories. Our outward calm veils inner turbulence. Much of the confidence we project is a camouflage we perfect.

And when you admit to that, you’re blessed with others’ admissions. You join an informal community of people eager or at least willing to embrace the messy and liberating truth.

I joined it after suddenly losing some of my eyesight several years ago, being told that I might go blind and then writing about that. My account seemed to resonate with readers in part because my condition exemplified a public-private disconnect.

Nothing about my composure or appearance suggested trouble. I met my deadlines. I honored my obligations. My eyes looked the way they’d always looked. But they didn’t act the way they’d always acted. Never again would I read as fleetly and fluidly as before. Never again would I type with as much ease and as few errors.

That was the bad part. The good? Never again would I trust that I knew anything important about someone — or, really, anything at all — from what was evident on the surface.

I understand in a new and important way that struggle isn’t exceptional. It’s inevitable. It’s endemic. It’s our default setting. It’s just often hidden, and I wonder what life would be like if we all walked around wearing sandwich boards that listed what we’re enduring. What we’re surviving. What we’ve overcome.

That was the gist of an excerpt from my new book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” that The Times published on Tuesday. (To add to that today, here’s a corresponding portion of the audio version of the book.) The excerpt comes from a chapter of “The Beauty of Dusk” titled “The Sandwich Board Theory of Life,” which posits that our moments of self-pity would be rarer and our capacity for empathy stronger if we knew the full truth of the people around us. Sometimes we simply can’t, but sometimes it’s a matter of looking more closely, listening more attentively, signaling an openness to that knowledge, asking the right questions. It entails a shift in perspective and a heightened awareness.

Much has been written about the psychological impact of the honeyed lives that people project on Instagram, Facebook and other social media. Everyone’s at a party to which you haven’t been invited. Everyone’s children are excelling, everyone’s cakes are rising, everyone’s trip to Grand Cayman or the Grand Canyon was heaven on earth.

But that’s only one set of dispatches and one way to read them. I take in different, or at least additional, information. I notice when the CNN anchor John King, who exhibits such preternatural poise and split-second decisiveness in front of those color-coded maps on election night, reveals that more than a decade ago, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

“I remember like it was yesterday,” he said in an article by Emily Strohm in People magazine in November, mentioning “the first look at the M.R.I. and the lesions that look like little dried flowers running up the spinal cord and nerves.”

“I was petrified,” he said. And he has lived ever since with the question of whether those lesions might someday impair him.

I hear the “cancer” buried in a long story that someone is telling about her past and realize that while the word is rushing by for most listeners, the reality didn’t rush by for her and the fear of its recurrence is probably still present.

I welcome the stories shared with me — by the record producer who, at the peak of his career, lost hearing in one ear, jeopardizing his livelihood, or by the Vietnam veteran who sometimes feels acutely self-conscious, all these decades later, about the prosthesis where his lower leg used to be. They’ve been met with mighty challenges, but those trials aren’t obvious to most of the people around them.

And I accept that my compromised, imperiled vision isn’t some extraordinary thing. It’s just my thing.