Refraction

Stress always makes me see things like one sees things underwater. It is like a buzzing, flickering fluorescent light that distorts the way I perceive things.  Tiny, manageable details become overpowering, magnified and refracted as they are through my bulging eye ball, puffy with stress. Meaningless glances or happenings appear threatening.  I struggle with keeping perspective during these periods and I am currently trying to prepare a strong counterweight in my mind, so I can have a safe place in my mind to retreat to when this happens again.

Then I came across this quote and it reminded me that refraction can work for me, not just against me.

 "The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect."-Walter  Pater

Light can be bent a million different ways.  Light can dazzle and blind and dominate if it is angled in a particular way, but I can bend light in a whole bunch of angles too.