The Gap

There is a moment in the film where Neo looks at his hand.

He is in the construct. He is himself, the self his mind insists on, and yet there is still the adjustment and the faint cognitive dissonance of occupying a space that feels right after so long in one that didn’t. The body and the image are not yet the same thing. The gap is closing, but it is still there.

I’ve spent most of my life in that gap.

It is difficult to explain what the gap feels like to someone who has never experienced it. Not because it is abstract — it is anything but — but because it is so constant that it becomes part of the texture of ordinary life. You stop noticing it the way you stop noticing the sound of traffic outside a window you’ve lived next to for years. It’s always there. You just learn to hear around it.

The gap is the pause before you answer to a name that isn’t quite yours. It is the way you move through certain rooms: locker rooms, changing rooms, any room where the body becomes visible and therefore subject to interpretation. It is the accumulation of small corrections you don’t make, small truths you don’t offer, because the effort of explaining outweighs the relief of being understood.

It is, more than anything, the performance. The daily, low-level performance of a self that is adjacent to the real one. Close enough to pass. Not close enough to rest.

I got good at the performance. Most people in this situation do, because the alternative, living openly in the gap, letting it be visible invites a particular kind of scrutiny that takes more energy than the performance does. So you perform. You get fluent. You tell yourself that fluency is the same as comfort, that competence is the same as contentment.

It isn’t.

What it actually is, I’ve come to understand, is a kind of deferral. A very long, very patient putting-off of the inevitable. The RSI doesn’t go away because you ignore it. The image the mind projects doesn’t fade because the body contradicts it. If anything it becomes clearer over time, more insistent, more precisely defined, as if the mind, frustrated by the wait, is sharpening the picture to make sure you can’t miss it.

I couldn’t miss it anymore.

The gap has a cost. Not a dramatic one, not the kind that announces itself. A quiet one. The kind that shows up as a low-grade flatness, a faint sense of watching your own life from slightly outside it. The kind that makes certain moments, moments that should feel uncomplicated, easy, fully inhabited feel like they’re happening to someone who is almost you.

I don’t want to live almost. I don’t want to be the signal that never quite reaches the receiver.

I know what the image looks like. I know who I am in the construct.

Part three is about what I’m doing about it.