Blepharospasm (Eyelid Spasm)

Your eyelid twitches. It contracts, cramps, closes — sometimes for seconds, sometimes longer. You cannot control it. A muscle you normally don't even consciously notice suddenly takes over and literally closes off your view of the world. In severe cases the eye stays shut for minutes at a time. You are not blind — but you cannot see.

Medically, blepharospasm is a focal dystonia, an involuntary cramping of the musculature around the eye. From a neurological standpoint there is a misdirection in the basal ganglia. But the psychosomatic perspective asks a different question: what is it that you don't want to see — or can't look at without inwardly cramping? Why does your body close your eyes, as though it needs to protect you from your own gaze?

An eyelid spasm is not nervousness, but a drawn curtain before a stage on which something is playing that you are not letting yourself watch.