This isn’t the kind of film to watch alone on a dark and stormy night. Its not in the horror genre, but it is hard and raw and tense and angering. And after I watch a story like this I think, there are real people struggling through very similar kinds of circumstances at this very moment. And I’m grateful someone was willing to so effectively paint their plight.
Father, deliver us…
Amazon.com : Watch an Author Video.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard Heather Sellers interviewed on NPR regarding face blindness, and her memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know. The interview revealed little of Heather’s personal background, but my immediate response was, “Face blindness sounds like something that could be psychosomatically induced by trauma. I need to read her story.”
Well, I just finished reading it, and there is no evidence verifying psychological or emotional trauma can induce face blindness. But… she definitely had more than her share.
The most helpful things for me in Heather’s book related to her skill in communicating her own thoughts and feelings. She had incredible self doubt when evaluating her family experiences as a child. And as an adult, her mental battles and resistance to breaking free of the prison her disability had placed her in were very telling. She resists, and resists going public with her challenges. When she finally shares her struggle with friends and co-workers in a mass email, she discovers she may not be the only one in her circle with this challenge. And she quickly becomes a “face blindness evangelist,” pressing others to go public, too. You feel the burden being freed from her shoulders once she shines the light in her dark corner.
I saw a lot of myself in her distorted self-assessments, and mental narratives-to-self, projecting what she believed other people to be thinking – about her, about her parents as she was growing up.
There are some unanswered questions. But books can never give you the entire story. I am amazed Heather is so able to love her parents, in spite of her experiences. That, in itself, is very humbling.
