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“Being safe is about being seen and heard and allowed to be who you are and to speak your truth.” ~ Rachel Naomi Remen
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And that’s all that we end up fighting for in our lives, isn’t it?
We want to know if we’re really visible, if our words have any meaning, do people really care about us?
At the end of the day, every human being’s journey is about being seen, heard, and validated for who they are, and we’re all trying to achieve this in some way or another.
While some ways might be good, there are a lot of dysfunctional ways that we end up using that make us feel that we’re being seen in some way, they are simply diminishing our light. Some realise earlier, some a bit later, and some don’t get there at all.
And where do these other ways come from? From our experiences that have led us to believe that the only safest way to be seen is to actually dim our own light so that someone else’s can shine bright. When the whole experience of trying to be ourselves is marred with ignorance, dismissal, and invalidation, and more so during our formative years, we have no option but to stay in one corner. The risk of being ourselves feels way too much to handle and we’re often wondering if being seen and valued for who we are is even real or not.
This growing up is funny. Paradoxical in so many ways. On one hand, we’re told that we’ll only be worthy if we fulfill certain criteria, and we quickly join the ongoing race for love, appreciation, approval, and recognition, and then after some time, some of us do end up realising that these ways of relating to ourselves and the world is actually doing the opposite.
Instead of making us secure in who we are, what we stand for and aspire for, we become fearful and afraid of our own thoughts, emotional experience, and expression of self. In trying to connect with the world, we lose the connection with ourselves.
We grow up thinking that it must be our fault. We’re probably not worth anyone’s time and attention. So we run, hide, go quiet, make ourselves small, and even invisible, hoping that someone some day will love us for who you are. The waiting, wishing, hoping goes on.
And where does this need to be invisible, stay small, come from? What drives us to do this to ourselves?
“Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen. It’s tough to do that when we’re terrified about what people might see or think.” ~ Brené Brown
Because our needs were not acknowledged, understood, validated, and respected, most or maybe all the time, and we had no option but to think that it’s probably because we as a human being have no value, let alone our needs.
But, we still had and have those needs…they aren’t going anywhere. So we found some other ways to meet them. Ones that kept costing us until we reached a point where our sense of self was eroded completely.
We people-pleased our way through relationships, suppressed our emotions and desires, played small, became available to the world more than what was needed. We put blinders on that made it impossible for us to see the colors of the world and kept running on this track that read, “You’re unworthy and you need to work harder to be seen, heard, and validated.”
It’s kinda exhausting, isn’t it?
To carry the burden of our unmet needs, people’s expectations, our own identity crisis, trying to fit in. And we think this is how it is.
No, it’s not.
We’re only paying the cost of being unseen and we’re the ones going bankrupt—mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually.
So, what do we do?
We start walking back toward our own self. We build a connection with ourselves from scratch by:
Damini Grover writes more about the self-love journey in her book, Time to Come Home.
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