And a person who is shamed every single time her perception fires eventually stops trusting her perception.

That is the machinery.

It is not that I could not see.

It is that I was trained, patiently, over months, to distrust my own eyes, until seeing clearly felt like a character flaw I was working to overcome.

Madrid broke the machinery only because it was too crude to be explained away.

You cannot tell a woman she is imagining things when the man has physically walked onto a plane holding her boarding pass.