This morning I came across Otissia Lynette’s essay: Fear of Being Seen: The Witch Wound and How to Heal it. The essay is incredible, and deserves a read. What caused me pause was the question she posed: What does visibility feel like in your body? Immediately, I reached for my pen and scribbled my hurried thoughts onto paper. In an attempt to salvage my own relationship with visibility, I’m sharing said thoughts here. Unplanned. Unedited. Unfazed by their imperfections.
What does visibility feel like in your body?
Like shallow breath being swallowed down pipes too small to hold it. Anxiety. Fear. Wretchedness. I feel like a lamb being served on a platter for ravenous wolves to devour, limb by limb. There is startling fear in what others will think of me or say about me, and in my reflection I realize that these feelings are new. There was a time when I was fearless ….and free.
The liberation I once felt has eroded after being confronted with insidious surveillance time and time again. I felt free until people started trodding my name and my work through the mud. I allowed them to create discomfort. Shame. Mistrust. They planted seeds of insecurity, and I watered them with self doubt until the seeds grew and planted roots large enough to shrink me. Reduce me to the nothingness they had hoped it would. I let them win. And, I’ve based my existence on proving those people wrong. In fighting tooth and nail for them to open their eyes just enough so they see my worth. Wasted time. People that blind will never know what true fortune is, and I’ve been a fool for trying.
This introspection has been a gateway to repairing the relationship I have to visibility. I intend to restructure it, and then revive myself through it. I am almost certain there is medicine to be found in this journey.
I feel this in my bones. Thank you for sharing.
Incredible reflection on how external judgment literally reshapes our internal landscape. The way this unfolds the erosion from fearless to fearful is powerful, especially that moment about watering seeds of doubt until they shrink us. I've been through something similiar where I let criticism dictate my whole presence online for like 2 years. The reframe of visibility as medicine rather than exposure is somethign I needed to hear today.