Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

The line names a common moral and relational failure: substituting an imagined version of another person for the person actually before us. It suggests that disappointment (“you’re not what I would have you be”) can become a willful kind of blindness, where our expectations, ideals, or need for control distort perception. The speaker admits complicity—“I blind myself”—implying this is not mere misunderstanding but an active refusal to see. In L’Engle’s broader concerns as a writer, the thought resonates with themes of love as attentive recognition, and of truth as something encountered through humility rather than imposed through desire.