I’ve been telling myself for years that it is okay to be who you are, but not show anyone. To live hiding in the dark. Existing in stolen moments at 3 am in a journal.
It’s not.
I’ve been scared of visibility. Scared of what I imagined was the unconscionable weight of inconveniencing people with my existence.
Somehow I came out of childhood convinced that asking for attention or inconveniencing someone with an idea they hadn’t already thought of was tantamount to stabbing them in the backside with a pitchfork.
But it’s necessary (being seen, not pitchforks).
Visibility is required for any kind of creative work or business. If you want to go your own way in the world, build things you care about, do meaningful things – you have to let other humans see you do it (Unless you are like, a fish whisperer and plan to live in a hut in the woods asking fish to get in your dinner pot – let us not speak of that guy, he’s weird).
People can’t buy your thing, read your writing, admire your art, or even hire you to do a decent job if they don’t know you exist. You have to be seen existing for this to work.
Since earlier this year, I’ve been in the process of learning not just how to be seen again, but why. Why is visibility necessary? How is it …okay… if it is a bother to people sometimes, for me to exist and disagree with them and ask for attention?
This is what I’ve learned:
1) What you show people is the identity you are living as.
That’s your life. That’s the level you will create in the world at. Those are the regrets you get to live with.
You can play wartime spy for a while, and pretend outwardly even though you are something different within – but that’s survival mode, desperation, and a wrong that eventually demands to be righted, or you will lose who you are in the lie.
2) Living visibly as yourself means you get to grow.
It’s a bit like a plant kept on a shelf of a dark room. You might get just enough light to survive, but you’ll never thrive. Something vital inside of you is always starving.
Getting the space and exposure, the challenges and self understanding, of living visibly lets you move into thriving.
You can progress and become a better human in a way that you never could have while hiding.
3) The mirror helps you refine yourself and the work.
Sharing is like holding your ideas up to a mirror. It helps you see and understand yourself better. It’s a necessary polishing step in the process of becoming a good human.
When you share with other people, you discover that stuff you thought was great doesn’t work for them or in real life.
Even more importantly, you learn things you thought were weird, bad, or insignificant about you are actually the best parts.
People love your flaws because it helps them understand their own flaws better too – and the things we have to do to overcome them are the most valuable lessons.
4) Your beautiful idiocy is a lighthouse.
People don’t need generic guru advice. They need someone who understands the same mud that they just lost a boot in.
All the things that you have gone through – your trying and failing and getting back up and course correcting; your failures and successes and the weird mental back flips you have to do to make things work for you – that is what moves someone else forward.
That is what makes a lesson click in someone’s weird brain when absolutely nothing else will – you having a weird brain too.
Their suffering makes sense, when they understand what climbing the mountain cost you.
5) Real people sharing their real truth is how humanity grows.
Sharing the truth was never only for wizards.
We all learn what it takes to be more authentically ourselves and live better lives – through the process of doing it, and seeing other people do it. That’s what lights up those mirror neurons.
When we see someone else doing what we want to do (in the same beautiful, f*cked up way we would have to go about it) it helps bring us home. It helps us figure out not only the external steps, but the internal ones too, to get where we long to go. It makes us ALL better.
That’s what’s cool about Substack.
It’s a place for practicing visibility, being seen as our beautiful, screwed up selves. And sharing that with other people on the same road, who can see themselves in our muck. And finding ways through together.
Maybe this is the next idea-fermentation tank, like they had in the Renaissance. Maybe this is how humanity starts to grow up – by seeing eachother, one imperfect post at a time.
What have you been scared to share — and does hiding hurt enough yet to do it anyway?
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