By Adrian Cho, Ph.D.
The wickie stands, numbly staring out at the turbulent ocean. Nothing about the lighthouse itself or its surroundings changes. The same impassive tower. The same grey horizon. He doesn’t know how long he’s been on that rock, unable to tell what’s real from what’s not. Before too long, he can’t say what day it is, what he’s said before, or whether the man sitting across the table from him is who he thinks he is.
In Robert Eggers’ 2019 film The Lighthouse, Winslow, the film’s deuteragonist, is a “wickie” (late 19th century slang for a lighthouse keeper). It was a vital job for maintaining maritime trade, but as an occupational hazard, wickies were often stranded at their posts, cut off from the rest of the world by the tempestuous North Atlantic. Over what should have been a four-week stint on a remote rock off the coast of New England, Winslow slowly loses his ability to separate what he’s actually experiencing from what he’s remembering or imagining.
Around this time in the application cycle, many of my students describe a version of the same thing, sitting with their seventh or tenth (or was it twentieth?) essay draft. A student says, “I don’t know. It looks fine, I guess. But I’m not really sure it sounds like me.” Nothing is technically wrong with the essay, and yet the writer can no longer quite recognize it as theirs.
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Welcome to October, the spooky season. For many high school seniors, the spookiest part will be the impending deadlines. Horror comes in many flavors, from jump scares to slow dread, and one of my favorites is the uncanny: the feeling that something familiar is just a bit off, and you can’t quite say why.
Winslow’s story is an extreme case, but the feeling often starts small. It’s that dark corner of the basement you’ve passed a hundred times without a thought, until today, when for no reason you can discern, you look twice. It’s the face in the mirror you’ve seen every morning of your life, until one night, in dim light, you hold its gaze a heartbeat too long and it starts to look like a stranger’s. It’s the draft you’ve read so many times you could recite it, until one afternoon it reads like something someone else wrote. In this post, I want to examine what that feeling is, why it happens, and what you can do about it.
When the Familiar Turns Foreign
Here’s a small experiment you can try. Take a very ordinary word, like “pen,” and write it out thirty times as fast as you can. Somewhere around the thirtieth repetition, usually about a minute in, a lot of people start having a weird feeling: the word starts to look wrong. Not misspelled exactly, just not like a word anymore, as if someone had talked you into believing it was one.
Psychologists call this jamais vu, “never seen,” the mirror image of déjà vu (“already seen”). A familiar thing suddenly feels unfamiliar even though you know perfectly well that it isn’t. When researchers Akira O’Connor and Chris Moulin tried it on 94 undergraduates, about 70 percent reported it. It isn’t confined to words, either. Musicians describe losing their place in passages they’ve played hundreds of times, especially during a performance (I’ve certainly had mishaps with this myself). One leading explanation is “semantic satiation”: look at or repeat something long enough and the brain’s response to it wears down. O’Connor and Moulin describe jamais vu as a signal that something has become too automatic and fluent.
Of course, your essay draft isn’t a word written thirty times. It changes with every pass, and the ideas in it develop. Yet the familiarity piles up all the same. Each read-through makes the text a little more fluent, and the more fluent it gets, the more you may be reading what you remember putting there instead of what’s on the page. Confusion creeps in, then doubt. And the usual response, reading it again, only deepens the feeling. There’s another wrinkle too. Unlike a word, a draft really can drift. After enough rounds of edits, the phrasing that once felt right can get sanded down into something more polished but less you. So the feeling can be an illusion of exposure, a sign that the essay has really drifted, or both, and from the inside it can be maddeningly difficult to tell which.
Breaking the Spell
You don’t have to settle whether that feeling is an illusion or a signal before you act, and the most boring remedy is also one of the best: put the draft down. If staring wears down the brain’s response, time away is the natural way to let it recover (“sleep on it” is age-old advice for a reason). Work on something else for a day or two, and put a time to come back on your calendar so a break doesn’t turn into avoidance. Better yet, plan it well before the deadline, so that you aren’t left stressed with no time to take a step back.
Time away isn’t the only way to reset your reading. You can also make the draft unfamiliar on purpose. Literary critics call this practice “defamiliarization” – interrupting the fluency that’s been smoothing your reading so you approach the words on the page with fresh eyes. Print the draft, change the font and size, read the paragraphs in reverse order. I’ve covered more techniques like this (reading aloud, recording yourself, summarizing each paragraph with a sentence) in How to Revise When You’re Stuck in Your Own Head.
Finally, some checks you can’t run on yourself. Working with one of us, you get a reader who has heard how you actually talk, which gives the essay a reference point you’ve lost. And before an essay is final, we share it with a colleague who has never seen it, for a genuinely fresh read. The first reader checks whether it still sounds like you, and the second checks how it lands for someone coming in cold.
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Winslow’s problem is that he doesn’t have anyone he can trust on that rock when he starts losing his grip. With your essays, you aren’t stranded. If a draft starts to feel like a stranger’s, be skeptical of that feeling. Treat it as a cue to look again, with fresh eyes and a new reader, not as a verdict on the draft or on you.
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