Learning to be Seen
On visibility, social anxiety, and the relationship between authenticity and safety
Being seen can be uncomfortable.
So many of us have felt that uncomfortable feeling just after we post something we care about. Maybe it happened as soon as you sent your latest screenplay to a friend to read. Or maybe you felt it after you finished a new illustration and decided to post it to your social media accounts for others to see - and possibly like but also possibly judge. It’s that tight feeling in our chests, that restlessness beneath our skin, that old fear and nervousness that leads us to ask, What are they going to think? Did that sound stupid? Are they going to judge me?
Our brains are so good at preparing us for possible social danger or risk. Sometimes maybe a little too good. Even as I’m posting this, I’m wondering if this will actually help someone or if there’s something I haven’t yet learned at this stage of my growth as a writer that will be obvious to someone else who has already learned it.
When I try to gather these ideas into one post that people may find helpful, will I edit it and wring it out to fit online spaces until all the good and personal bits have been squeezed out? Hopefully not.
That’s the funny thing about our fears. Even when they’re specific, we can misread them. My worries about what I don’t yet know, or about overworking this, or about whether it will be helpful enough could be telling me that the writing I do on here matters to me. But my urge to then check and recheck the writing may not be the key to that. It may actually be that this fear is soothed by letting myself try and grow. Which typically means putting ourselves out there before we’re quite ready yet.
When trying to do this, I draw courage from a few things from psychology.
First:
Sometimes the spotlight isn’t quite as bright as it feels.
In psychology we talk about the Spotlight effect. We tend to overestimate how much other people notice us - our appearance, our mistakes, our awkward moments, the things we say or do. There’s also a related phenomenon called the illusion of transparency, or our tendency to overestimate how visible our internal states are to other people.
You know you’re nervous. You can feel your heart beating and your palms and pits getting damp. You know that you just stumbled over your last sentence because your mind blanked partway through. And you assume everyone else must be noticing too.
But they probably aren’t.
It isn’t because you aren’t important or that you aren’t saying or creating things worth noticing. I’m sure you are and you are. But we have so much demand for our attention, so we tend to give less and less of it to one another. That’s actually something that at times breaks my heart as a therapist, adorer of humans, and mom, but when it comes to visibility fears, it’s sort of helpful.
You’re experiencing yourself will full awareness of your internal world, body, and flaws. They’re experiencing you from the outside and through the noise of their own feelings, thoughts, and associations. You’re experiencing your adventure, and they are watching the highlights reel of your adventure while also thinking about everything going on in their own life.
Because be honest - how many times have you been only partially listening to someone talking in a meeting, and partially wondering what you’ll be saying next, what others in the room are doing, what your partner said the other day, or whether you are as prepared as you want to be?
You may spend the next hour replaying the thing you just said, but most likely the other person has already moved on to thinking about their meeting tomorrow, or a conversation they hope to have with their spouse later, or their child’s upcoming dentist appointment. Or heck, they may also be thinking about the weird thing they said earlier today. Most people are not waiting for you to mess up, or bothering to think about ways you did or didn’t mess up, most of the time.
You’ve probably noticed this from the other side. You see things each day without really thinking about them. We scroll past a hundred things and may find ourselves thinking, That’s nice, or huh, or even nothing at all. You can walk the same walk each morning and still notice something new one day when you actually decide to pay attention.
When people encounter your posts or your work, it may be something similar to that. People are either interested or they move on. Thankfully, it isn’t usually hatred, humiliation, or bringing it up again later to embarrass you. They just don’t have the time or attention to space.
It can also be nice to remind ourselves to count indifference as neutrality rather than rejection. Someone did not feel like reading it because they can see it’s long and they’re tired, or something else caught their attention, or the title just didn’t pull them in. That doesn’t mean you aren’t a worthy person or creative. You just aren’t speaking to that person right now. Perhaps it’s a skill gap or a mismatch, or perhaps it not really much of anything. Just neutral.
If it helps, you can imagine yourself sitting at a coffee shop with the small handful of people you’re actually talking to. The people scrolling by are like the people who walk in, buy coffee and either sit somewhere else or leave. They aren’t a reflection on the quality of your conversation, because they’re not a part of it right now. These social media sites are just odd versions of public places in a way.
But sometimes that spotlight really is there.
I definitely don’t just want to tell you that no one is paying attention so don’t worry about it. Your reactions and self-protective patterns do come from somewhere.
Sometimes people are paying attention. Or for some people, being watched, judged, or questioned is something you’ve personally experienced. Maybe you went through bullying, workplace discrimination, or constant criticism in a personal or work setting. Maybe you learned that being different attracted unwanted attention or that taking up space meant being targeted. That can leave an impact on us and it’s actually kind to ourselves to acknowledge this.
You didn’t develop this discomfort around visibility because you wanted to be miserable right now as you’re trying to make your first YouTube video or present your artwork at a gallery or send your submission to a publisher. You developed it because some part of you wants to protect you from something.
And if you’ve experienced what it’s like to be dismissed, stereotyped, underestimated, excluded, or treated as though you had to prove you belonged, this fear may have been learned from very real moments of pain and harm.
Sometimes we feel unwelcome because we are being treated as unwelcome.
This is the part of what can get lost when we talk about imposter syndrome without talking about impostorization. Sometimes we feel we don’t belong even when there’s little evidence that anyone else thinks we don’t. It’s more of an internal block or old wound. And sometimes we’ve been treated as though we don’t belong until we start to anticipate it. The first calls for challenging a story we’re telling ourselves. The second calls for finding safer people, communities, or teams to create within.
Audre Lorde talked about this tension beautifully in 1977, when she delivered a speech about the transformation of silence into action.
"In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear - fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgement, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.
And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyways, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we can still be no less afraid.”
Sometimes the patterns that we learned to protect ourselves aren’t really protecting us at all. In fact, they may be continuing the work of those who hurt us in the past by keeping us uncertain, small, and invisible.
We don’t have to gaslight ourselves into feeling safe when we aren’t. We can build more safety too.
This has a personal and interpersonal side to it. Personally, we can practice small, lower-stakes acts of visibility. The point here is to build your confidence by letting yourself get a few small wins. I’m going to feel a win like that when I post this article. It’s one article in a sea of articles, but it’s also a practice of sharing psychology in ways that may help fellow creative people.
Even if when I’m writing this, I’m writing it to about 20 lovely people who have decided to subscribe to my new project. Each time I talk to you all, it’s a small win for building my confidence in sharing things with you. And that brings me to the interpersonal side: we improve our support in taking these steps. This can mean finding people who are in your corner, inviting feedback from people who care about you, and spending more time in places where you feel welcome to take up space. You all have been so lovely and encouraging. Writing isn’t just a personal practice, it’s an experience of connecting with our fellow humans. And feeling safer and safer as we do so.
Sometimes the most helpful response to social anxiety isn’t to convince yourself it’s fine or to push past it. It’s create spaces for yourself where you feel increasingly safe to be yourself.
Your fear may have a history.
Your fears didn’t appear out of nowhere or for no reason. This was probably something you learned to protect yourself from.
Early in life, other people play a significant part in how we learn to see ourselves. Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley talked about how we develop our identity in part by how we see ourselves reflected in the actual or imagined reactions of others. Especially as children when we first learned about ourselves and the world.
If we were met with silence, dismissal or disinterest when we tried to share or connect, we might have learned that we are not interesting enough. If our needs or hopes were met with impatience or irritation, we might have learned to think of our own feelings and needs as an inconvenience. If we were met with criticism and shaming, we might have learned that it was safer to hide than to try.
And those lessons can follow us into adulthood.
So instead of asking, Why am I like this? I’d encourage you to ask, What is this part of me trying to protect me from?
And then, Do I still need this kind of protection?
Because sometimes our protective strategies outlive the situations we learned them for.
Our choice to not write or not speak or not take that chance can provide us short-term relief, as avoidance does. In the long term, it adds more evidence to our belief that perhaps visibility is something that really is still unsafe. When we avoid a thing, it reinforces the idea that the thing is too big or too much for us. If we are trying to teach ourselves something new - that we can be seen and still be okay - that means doing something new.
Visibility is a Practice.
We sometimes talk about confidence as if it comes first. You feel confident and then you put yourself out there.
But often, the order is reversed. You put yourself out there. You survive. You learn something and it give you enough courage to try again. You survive again and over time you notice that you are becoming a little more comfortable each time.
Confidence follows doing.
This doesn’t mean you have to launch yourself into the deep end. I think of a term from my husband’s side of the family, “Sink or swim.” This does not have to be your grandpa throwing you off the dock and telling you to either learn swimming or experience the trauma of sinking into the murky depths.
You can practice incrementally. You can share something small, but edit it less. You can give yourself small practices like making a small video or note each day for the next few weeks. Visibility challenges are great for this because we can decide in a group with support to practice doing a new habit each day, letting it get a little less scary and a little less precious each time we do so.
Let yourself gather small bits of evidence that you can put yourself out there and be okay. Let yourself read that someone disagreed or didn’t particularly like what you made, and notice how that sucks, but you are still okay. This all is helpful for making visibility feel less threatening.
The goal here isn’t to stop feeling vulnerable. It’s to discover that vulnerability doesn’t have to be a threat.
What’s one form of showing up in a more authentic way you could choose to do today?
Another helpful thing to remember is that:
Maybe people aren’t remembering you the way you think they are.
There is another comforting possibility here. Even when people do remember us, it’s still not usually us they’re thinking about. Often, what sticks is something about their own experience that was interesting or meaningful to them.
That could mean a thought they had while listening to you, something you reminded them of, a feeling they experienced when reading your work, or a possibility they hadn’t considered before. They may have remembered your conversation because it helped them name something happening in their own life. If they remember you, it’s oftentimes because they felt understood when listening to you. Which is really sweet.
Now, you may be saying, no no no. Sometimes people really do get upset and keep thinking about it because I got it so very wrong. And maybe.
But think about the last time you saw someone do something embarrassing. For many of us, we immediately think of ourselves. We cringe because we imagine how much we would not want to be in that situation. Or we feel our own desire to avoid such a thing. Sometimes we feel compassion for them, or relief it wasn’t us. And sure, sometimes we think they messed up. That can be a piece of it too. But it’s rarely all of it.
This is important because I think it lets us change our approach from “How will people remember me” to “What do I want people to experience when they interact with me?” Your art isn’t actually just about you. We create and raise these beautiful things that then like birds fly off into the world. We don’t actually control how people experience what we make, what meaning they’ll take from it, what reaction they’ll have to it, or what they’ll do with it. Once we make it and share it, our art takes on a lovely little iterative life of its own in so many ways. As art always does.
I think that’s part of creating too. Accepting the chaotic magic of connection that moves beyond what we can imagine from our limited vantage point.
The strange thing about being your actual self.
There’s another reason visibility matters, especially when you’re building something creative or meaningful. If you spend your energy managing how other people may perceive you, you can get caught up in presenting a persona or mask. And when people connect with the mask, they aren’t actually connecting with you.
Another concern here is that sometimes they like the version of yourself you constructed, which can be it’s own burden because that means carrying forward that mask if you want to keep meeting that promise with them.
It can also be lonely.
Because you are then trading the vulnerability and joy of being known for the more reachable reward for performing.
Showing up honestly creates possibility. Yes, some people may not like you or understand you or be interested in what you’re making. And that will sting because it’s you not the mask. But someone may also be able to say, Oh I like how this person thinks. I want to work with someone like this.
Visibility isn’t supposed to be about getting everyone to like you. It’s about giving people a chance to see the real you and inviting the people looking for you to realize that they just found who they’ve been looking for.
Maybe the trick then is to think less about the spotlight and more about why you’re stepping into it in the first place. Who are you hoping to reach and connect with? What do you want to create?
We can also practice being someone who is safe to be seen by.
When I say self-compassion, people don’t always know what that actually means. So when it comes to visibility, I want you to remember that you are your first audience member. What kind of audience are you being for yourself?
Imagine that someone you care about has just taken a risk. They shared something they’re proud of, they spoke up in a meeting, they published something personal, or they experimented with a new form of art. And afterwards they’re embarrassed and worried others hated it. They tell you they think they looked stupid or silly or some other negative label they’ve probably heard before.
Would you respond to them by saying, “Yes, you’re right. Everyone thinks you’re embarrassing or incompetent.” Probably not.
You would maybe say something like:
“I thought you were brave. I like that you put yourself out there.”
Or
“You don’t know what everyone else was thinking. Maybe they enjoyed it. Maybe they didn’t even notice or feel bothered by what you’re worried about.”
Or
“This feels vulnerable because it matters to you.” You may say, “You’re still learning. We all start out feeling a bit awkward. We all have to start somewhere but I think it’s cool you were willing to give it a try.”
We are often generous interpreters of others’ work and humanity and remarkably hostile to our own. So the next time you step into visibility, I want you to practice talking to yourself the way you would talk to a loved one. When the thought comes up, “They probably thought I was so unprepared or incompetent” for instance, try to respond with, “Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe they’re having a different reaction than what I’m imagining.”
When you think, “Everyone can tell I’m nervous.” You can tell yourself, “I know I’m nervous, but that doesn’t mean everyone else does.”
When part of you notices imperfections, you can remind yourself that you weren’t supposed to be perfect. You were just supposed to be trying and learning.
And when you genuinely don’t know what someone else thought or what someone’s impression of you was, practice leaving that spot blank. It can feel strange, but sometimes not knowing is more accurate than filling the space of uncertainty with an old explanation. Or even the worst possible explanation you can worry up.
If you’re going to be your first audience member, be a good one. Encourage yourself. Clap, encourage, and look for what you’re doing well.
What would happen if you stopped trying so hard not to fail?
Here’s an exercise to consider using as well - Invert the problem.
Instead of asking, How can I become more visible?
Ask yourself, What would I do if I were trying to make sure I was completely invisible? What would I do if I was actually trying to never grow?
You might wait to try until the conditions feel perfect. You might never share or put yourself out there. You may never make or post that video. You may never submit stories to publishers or share them online. You may stay silent until you can be sure the thing you are going to say will be received well.
You may avoid rooms where you feel inexperienced or like the odd person out. You may keep preparing or perpetually taking classes or watching others rather than doing it yourself. You may stay around people who never challenge you or encourage more of you.
You may believe feelings are facts. For instance, you may interpret silence as rejection, disagreement as dislike, and discomfort as danger.
You may make yourself smaller or keep all of your ideas safely locked away in your head. Maybe you’d decide that because visibility seems uncomfortable, you’ll just keep your ideas and creations to yourself so no one else can see them or judge them. That would guarantee staying small and invisible.
Out of curiosity, which of these are you already doing?
Because sometimes we spend so much time calculating the risks of being seen that we forget to factor in the cost of hiding. What does it cost you to stay exactly as visible (or invisible) as you are now?
Who doesn’t get to meet you and see you due to how visible you are now? What work doesn’t get made? What opportunities are missed? What conversations don’t happen? What fun experiences don’t find you? What parts of yourself never get the chance to grow because you’re keeping them tucked away from the sunshine.
Instead of just thinking about what you stand to lose if people see you (e.g., rejection), ask what you may gain. What might you miss out on if you keep NOT doing the thing?
And lastly…
We miss each other.
I think about this a lot, especially lately. We are living in an era of so much visibility. So many people we know in so many ways are present online or showing themselves in some way online. And yet we are also incredibly lonely.
We scroll past one another. We see polished versions of each other’s lives. We encounter carefully managed brands, identities, opinions, and accomplishments. We read AI-edited versions of everyone’s words. And yet, underneath these internet likes and LinkedIn impressions, there are still just people. Humans wondering, Am I too much? Am I doing enough? Am I enough? Do I belong here? What if people don’t like me?
Maybe one of the gifts we can give ourselves and others then is permission to be human. When we admit we’re nervous and keep going, someone else sees that it’s ok to try even when they’re still nervous.
When you share something imperfect, a part of you gets to see that we can share an imperfect thing and it’s ok. And someone else out there sees it too.
When you take up space without apology, some part of you learns you can do that. And someone else sees it and maybe feels an invite to do the same.
When you treat yourself with tenderness after a mistake, you can learn to expect kindness (at least from yourself) whether it works out like you’re hoping or not. You can teach yourself not to shame or abandon yourself if you don’t get things just right. You can teach yourself that the internal stakes are lower. Even if others judge you, at least you know you won’t be judging yourself.
Being seen isn’t the same as being watched or judged. The people you are trying to reach aren’t looking for a flawless performance. If anything, I think in the age of AI many of us like seeing little signs of humanity beneath the craft. We’re looking for something real.
And even when you post your real thoughts or share your beloved art, some will keep scrolling. You can remind yourself from a logical place that their scrolling on is ok. It’s good even. Because some people aren’t for you. And if you keep gently reminding yourself of that, eventually you’ll even feel the truth of it emotionally.
I hope you also remember though that you may do something brave and put yourself out there in a way that inspires someone else to pause. Some part of you may share a moment of wonder to some part of them that will then feel that wonder. And isn’t that the whole point of making in the first place?
Maybe they’ll recognize and connect with something you say and remember how that made them feel. Maybe they’ll think something like, Yes! Exactly! Or Finally, I’ve been looking for you.
Maybe the most helpful part of embracing visibility is to think less of the visibility itself. Think less about standing on the stage and more about why you’re on that stage in the first place. We get visible so that we can connect, create, and belong. So focus on the connection. Who are you genuinely wanting to connect with today?
With warmth and solidarity,
Dr. Jackie
