The Practice of Being Seen

“Seeing accurately is an act of love.”
- Eye of the Mountain

Most of my life I tried to be special, impressive and interesting.
For a long time, I thought that was my temperament.
But at some point, I realized it was a trauma pattern.

Being special allowed me to believe I deserved to be seen.
And being seen was a longing I didn’t know how to fulfill.

It goes back to childhood: the need to be recognized, known, cherished.
A need that wasn’t met. Not out of malice, but a lack of capacity.
I learned early: I am rewarded for performing,
I am punished for being authentic.

So I adapted.
My needs felt dangerous. My authenticity had to be hidden.
Performance became my way to earn attention,
and, more deeply, a sense of being allowed to exist.

I got good at it.
But the better I performed, the more hidden I became.
The need to be seen stayed unmet.
Just a typical shame based strategy
that undermined the very thing it was trying to protect.

Eventually I saw it. Undoing it took work.
This Substack was part of that work.
Public exposure. Radical honesty. Going into fear.
Staying present to the pain.
The recipe I’ve written about.

It worked. But not because I was seen.
Hardly anyone reads my work.
Even fewer respond. And when they do,
my capacity to receive it is limited.

So why did it work?
Because I stopped hiding.
By revealing my inner world,
I validated that it has value--
even without response.

That recognition changed something.
Opening up used to take effort. It hurt.
So I practiced it. Until it didn’t.
And now, ironically, I no longer crave to be seen.
I can meet that need myself. My story no longer feels urgent.
I don’t need it to be known. I no longer write to be seen.

I write to express. To process reality. To know who I am.
But mostly, I write because it is my practice.
And my practice shapes who I become.

It’s not hard to believe in your work when it’s successful.
Believing in it despite the lack of recognition is more complicated.
And I can’t say I always do. But I believe in the practice of writing.
Not performatively, not wishfully. Fiercely. Inevitably.

The need to be seen hasn’t completely disappeared.
We are relational beings after all. But it has evolved.
I don’t just want to be seen. I want contact.
Though my capacity for it is still limited.

Old reflexes remain: withholding, closing, distancing, accelerating.
My system still reads connection as danger.

So the practice changes.
Smaller bites.
Less urgency.
More patience.
This is not something to fix quickly.
It’s a lifetime of conditioning.

The urgency is fading. Acceptance is settling. Capacity is expanding.
My nervous system is learning to settle into growth, not rush into it.

And as I trust my practice more, it works more deeply.