Gately and Joelle talk veil and U.H.I.D. — "Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say…"
‘Which is fine, U.H.I.D. would say, to illustrate the U.H.I.D. take versus an apparently more AA take. U.H.I.D.’d say it’s fine to feel inadequate and ashamed because you’re not as bright as some others, but that the cycle becomes annular and insidious if you begin to be ashamed of the fact that being unbright shames you, if you try to hide the fact that you feel mentally inadequate, and so go around making jokes about your own dullness and acting as if it didn’t bother you at all, pretending you didn’t care whether others perceived you as unbright or not.’
Context
U.H.I.D. logic generalized past bodies: Joelle applies the shame-about-shame circle to Gately's buried conviction that he's slow — a deformity there's no veil for. The book's master-word "annular" lands on shame psychology, and the diagnosis is also the scene's power move: the veiled woman reading the unveiled man's hidden disfigurement.