See Me

I have spent the majority of my life dedicated to love. Love is the greatest accomplishment of life, yes? It is a gift, a drug, the highest high and the lowest low we can feel when removed. I have chased it, married it, mistaken other things for it, stayed when I should have left, left when I desperately wanted to stay. And I have spent an unbelievable amount of time in therapy trying to understand why the people who made me feel the most, were not necessarily the people with whom I felt the safest. I ask the question about butterflies, and whether they are an early warning signal from our “second brains”, rather than the excitement of a possible new love interest. Maybe it’s both.

Ever since I could remember opening my mouth, I have championed love. When my mother joined a cult of religious fanatics who controlled people with fear through religious dogma, I raged against her machine, saying “God is LOVE mom, not fear!” When my sister was taking her exams to go half-way across the world away from her boyfriend (who we both believed was her “Ever After” person), I begged her to reconsider, saying Love is more important than a master’s degree. They are still happily married 20 years later. I actively seek to evolve and learn and grow and become a better version of myself – all in the service of loving myself, my friends, my family, my fellows, my partners.

My life's motto could have been summed up by an old song about loving and being loved in return. However, as I have grown older and hopefully wiser, I find another truth lies beneath this motto: my deepest desire is to be fully Seen, not just loved.

I say this because I know the difference. My ex-husband and I were madly, truly, deeply in love with each other. But after time, I came to realise he didn’t actually SEE ME. He loved me very much, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, or was unable to fully see the person beneath his love.

For me, to be seen encapsulates quite a lot and yet so very little, all at the same time. It can mean someone who has witnessed me grow, learn, fail, succeed and has been part of my journey. It can also be someone who has listened deeply to my story and not put their own judgments or opinions on top of that. It can be a father who has loved me all of my life as his little girl and now sees the woman I am today. But it can also be a stranger, who sat down, looked deep into my eyes and smiled back with a certain knowingness that made my entire system sit up and take notice. “Aha!”, my self said. “I can see you, see me. Thank you”. It is so much more than words that I can string together to describe it. And yet it can be a fraction of a second of reflection in someone’s gaze. That’s when we know. You can feel it when someone sees you.

It’s a collision, it’s an implosion, it’s a connection, it’s a knowingness, it’s a reflection, it’s not any one word, it’s a feeling, it’s a consciousness shared. Being seen can take the shape of recognition, acceptance and curiosity. Recognition in the way someone understands something true about your inner experience. Acceptance in that you can reveal yourself without having to perform to earn their interest or connection. And curiosity when someone is willing to understand you on your own terms and keep learning as you change. My version of being seen may differ from yours. But I think the feeling of being fully seen, even for an instant, is universal.

Once I began thinking about human behaviour through that distinction, things I had previously understood as separate started looking connected. The child desperate to show you what she has made, the teenager constructing an identity loudly enough for everyone to notice, the adult pursuing the next promotion long after money has ceased to be the point, the woman changing herself to remain desirable to a man, the man collecting sexual partners, the person posting another photograph and checking who has looked at it, the celebrity known by millions who feels profoundly alone. Even our less attractive behaviours began to interest me differently. People will sometimes accept criticism rather than invisibility, provoke rather than disappear, perform rather than risk being ordinary, and become exceptionally good at being the person other people respond to while becoming increasingly disconnected from the person underneath. We call these things ambition, insecurity, narcissism, people pleasing, perfectionism, attention seeking, success. I began wondering whether at least some of them might also be different expressions of the same request: See Me.

I will often invite you to Find Your Self. It is an invitation to explore, understand and accept your full self – imperfections and all.

We are shaped by temperament, biology, family, culture, trauma, relationships, opportunity, accident and thousands of experiences we will never consciously remember. But we are also shaped by reflection. Long before we can describe ourselves, other people are already showing us who they believe us to be. We learn what makes them smile, what worries them, what earns attention, what creates distance and what brings them closer. We begin adjusting accordingly, and somewhere in that extraordinarily complicated exchange between temperament and environment, a self begins to emerge.

That raises the question at the centre of this book. If part of the self is developed through being seen by other people, what happens when the reflection is inaccurate? What happens when the parts of us that receive the most attention are not the parts that feel most true? What happens when we become exceptionally successful at performing an identity that once earned us love, safety, admiration or belonging? And what happens when, decades later, we finally stop performing long enough to look at ourselves?

My hope is that this book will help you recognise what is missing when you are loved but still feel unseen, and give you the language to talk about it. You may begin to notice which parts of yourself you share freely, which you hide, and which you have learned to perform in order to be loved, valued or accepted. You may also find that some of the ways you describe yourself belong to a version of you that you have outgrown. I hope you will leave with a clearer understanding of what being seen means for you, how you can begin to see yourself more honestly, and how to express what you need from the people in your life. And as you become more curious about yourself, you will become more curious about them too.

What I believe is that beyond love, there is an even deeper desire for recognition. That recognition does not need to come from a romantic interest. Fully seeing someone may lead to romantic love, or complement it, but love does not need to exist for one person to truly see inside, and bear witness to, another.

To be loved and then truly seen, and to have that person stay anyway, that is the dream.

I invite you to See Me, See Your Self and Stay.