Green Eyes and Matte Paint

Me, age 6, 7, 8ish?

A couple weeks ago, while seeking a small can of color-matched paint to do some minor repairs to the walls in our home, I had the following conversation with the Lowe’s paint person (she probably has a more official title than that):

“What finish level do you want?” she asked. (There are finishes ranging from matte to high gloss.)

“Whatever type of finish the chip is,” I said. “Since it’s the main paint color in my house, I think semigloss.” (Semigloss and satin paints are better for high-traffic rooms in houses with kids because they are easier to clean than matte.) Note that I said this without even looking at the paint chip I am holding.

She looked down at the paint chip and then back up at me. Did I imagine her moment of confusion? “Um, this actually looks like matte. . . . Do you have a hard time cleaning things off the walls?”

Yes, I thought. Especially that drawing the girls did that one day behind the laundry hamper.

She continued. “Does the paint come off when you try to scrub?”

I nodded. I got my matte-finish beige paint and left, my brain swirling with surprise.

I had lived for nearly three years in a house where every interior wall was painted in a matte finish, and I had never realized it. Not only had I not realized it, but when asked to consider what kind of paint it was, I was certain it was something else because that’s what I expected. I looked at these walls every day and hadn’t seen reality.

Now let’s talk about something else for a moment, shall we? Let’s talk about my eyes. Not their vision or my need for glasses (although that certainly seems relevant at the moment).

Their color.

 

 

My eyes are green. Only green. Would you not agree that these eyes are green? And as far as I can tell from pictures of myself that I scoured through recently, they have always been green. Well, except for that sky blue newborn phase.

Do you know what color I used to think they were? If you asked my teenage self, I would have curled my lip in distaste and said, “muddy green,” with emphasis on the muddy. I might also have said “hazel” (which, sorry to all you hazel people out there, I used to think was pretty much a muddy green).

In my mind is this scene from, I think, Joe vs. the Volcano. It’s the opening credits, and the song “Sixteen Tons” is playing as workers head toward a depressing, gloomy office. Amid the trudging feet of mindless drones is one tiny flower (a dandelion?) and a little patch of grass. And the people’s feet grind that flower and that grass into the mud. That is what I used to think of my eye color.*

This belief held sway up through and including at least much of college. In fact, I recall that as a freshman I got an email from Brice** in which he mentioned listening to “Green-Eyed Lady” and thinking of me.*** And I thought that was sweet and slightly idealized/delusional—since my eyes were only sort of green. It has only been in maybe the last five years or so that I’ve really scrubbed the mud out of my eyes (and it still takes a conscious effort to say just “green” rather than “brownish green”).

So now that I’ve hit you over the head with that, here’s my point: I looked at those eyes every day growing up, just like I look at these matte walls. And yet, I didn’t see them. My perception was reality.

As I have slowly realized this, it’s been sort of a shock. I asked the all-knowing Google if it was possible for eye color to change when you’re an adult (it is, but it is pretty uncommon and usually involves accident, disease, or weird genetics). I stared at myself in the mirror for any sign of that brown I was sure I had. This is why I scoured through all those pictures of me as a kid. Have I really always had green eyes? As far as I can tell, yes.

I will briefly veer off-course here for a moment to say that in my childhood fantasies of exactly how I would look if I could choose, I had “raven hair” and “violet eyes.” I blame Anne of Green Gables for this. But if I couldn’t have my violet eyes, I would have opted for straight greeny green, with no mud. The eye color I already had.

I have wondered how I could have spent all those years ignoring the reality right before me, and I have concluded that there a few different options. One possibility: someone said it to me, and it stuck. Or I read it in a book I identified with, and it stuck (see Anne above, if you don’t think that’s possible). Or it was just a symptom of an overall attitude about my looks and personality. I was the type of person who had muddy, dirty green eyes—not the type of person with clear, beautiful green ones.

I don’t know the specific truth here. And I don’t really have a moral to the story or a quick answer to what it all means. What I do have is a hope that my children never get perceptions like that stuck to them such that they can’t see who they really are. That I never stick such words to them. And also a hope that eventually I can scrub some other words from me as well.****

Are there ideas that are sticking to you, that define how you see yourself? Are they true? Is their attitude true? There is a world of difference between “brown and green” and “muddy green.” Are you looking at green and seeing mud? Are you looking at matte paint and seeing semigloss, just because that’s what you’re used to seeing or what you expected to see?  Are you fat, lazy, zitty, grandma-armed, slow, bad at [fill-in-the-blank], hormonal, stupid?

Look again. Don’t see semigloss because that’s what you’re used to seeing (and honestly, let me just say that I wish I was seeing semigloss instead of matte because boy are my walls dirty—but that’s an entirely different issue). Start with seeing nothing at all, and then really look. You may see something different.

Okay, lecture over. Now go watch Joe vs. the Volcano while you repaint your house (or, better yet, come repaint mine).

*I wonder how accurate my memory of that movie is. Is that really the way the movie starts?

**This was before we were dating but after I’d already realized I liked him.

***This should probably have been a clue that he liked me too, but I didn’t really believe that he might have liked me.

****Actually, all this looking at some of my childhood stuff was good for that too. I read some lovely, complimentary words from a couple of my high school teachers that directly contradicted some uglier ones from a college professor. I had kept them both, though—the lovely words and the ugly ones. When I again ran across that message from the professor, I almost clung to it and kept it as I had done for all these years. Then I thought, “No, I really don’t need this in my life.” Then I almost kept it anyway, until in a moment of courage I gave it to Brice, who tore it up and threw it away. So far I have resisted going through the trash and fishing it back out. Why would I want to? I have no idea.