Healing My Fear Of Being Seen Part I: What Is It?

Come along as I try to uncover and heal my fear of being seen, first be defining what the heck it is. And take your own journey, if you dare.

I’ve been ranting on about it lately:

I’m working on my fear of being seen.

But, like I used as an opener on TikTok (which is about to breach 10K followers!), “What does that even mean?”

The kind of thing where I can know I have it, without fully understanding: what the hell.

For me it shows up as:

• That twinge to wear something more ‘reasonable’ and less loud, now that I’ve moved back from my former city-girl life in Los Angeles to the quiets of the Pacific Northwest to be with my now-husband.
  

• A heavy dose of imposter syndrome before hitting publish here on Substack, or posting the damn TikTok of me just talking to the camera.
  

• The drop in my stomach when I leave social gatherings with new people in this new-yet-old town, where it’s clear to us all how different my likes, my preferences, how I spend my time is from the rest of the crowd.
  

• Wishing I could block everyone I’ve ever known on every social media so I could post into the void with whimsical abandon.
  

• The absolute terror knowing it’s time to stop writing for and about other people, and finally write about myself, my life, the lessons I have to share from a lifetime spent in an existential quagmire since 17. To be that bold, that selfish, that confident.

I want to break through. I must break through. Part of the reason I moved back in the first place is because I had the deep and burning desire to know I could be myself, in how I dress and the words I write and the vision I have for the world, proudly. Loudly. Unafraid.

A slew of youtube videos, a couple books, and a lot of meditating later and I’ve landed on step one of the process. Realizing:

A ‘fear of being seen’ is comes from a fear of seeing ourselves.

It’s me that I’m afraid of looking at. And it’s me that’s afraid to look.

Which begs the question: Look at what?

Oh a great many things: Looking at: why I’m not important or interesting enough to be the subject of my own work. Why writing about myself would make me bad, wrong, selfish (all the things that ‘good girls’ can never be.) Why I’m not pretty enough, don’t weigh the right amount, haven’t accomplished enough.

You, too, have your own stories of what you are afraid to look at. Once we develop the idea around any area of ourselves, it’s only a hop-skip-jump to decide that if we are scared to look at this horrible things about ourselves, so then should we be scared of anyone else seeing them.

Therein lies the shadow. Thank you, Carl Jung.

So for now, part one of unraveling this confusing world of a ‘fear of being seen’ is to fully and lovingly acknowledge it is me that is scared to look, and scared to be looked at by me. The most critical eye of all.

With that knowledge comes an immediate melting of the tension. The little girl me, dressed up in a tutu and wearing a crown (always, even to bed) crawls into my lap with tears in her eyes for having been bullied. Ironically, bullied by me. Told to go play alone in the corner for too long.

The fear subsides a bit. The confusion turns ever so slightly into compassion, before blooming into apologies and forgiveness.

What’s to come next will be a much easier step but for now, if you are willing to take the same journey with, be sure to follow this Substack and use these journal prompts to open to where you might be afraid of seeing yourself:

Journal Prompts:

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