The Crisis Tapes

Charlie Simokaitis’ The Crisis Tapes is an account of when his daughter gradually lost her ability to see over the course of two years and experienced a powerful psychological response to her imminent, presumably diminished, reality.

As my daughter gradually lost her ability to see over the course of two years, she experienced a powerful psychological response to her imminent, presumably diminished, reality. Depression and circular episodes of deep mental un-wellness have pervaded her subsequent life, and, reverberantly, that of our family, like a reoccurring grieving process. As parents seeking a pathway forward, we found ourselves navigating a bureaucratic network of mazes, with duplicitous functionaries acting as our guides in a hall of mirrors. Over time, we found we had assumed the role of subjective interpreters of her once-visible world, the descriptions of our surroundings, objects and phenomena becoming manifestly more exacting and streamlined. While our daughter, retreating from life, sought refuge in a forest of her own making, I drew from the emotionally heightened disorientation, rage and confusion of our everyday life - a life, for my daughter, that was growing narrower by degrees, in which the act of seeing itself was being thoroughly considered.