I’m sitting at the front window at Peerless, my co-officing location.

I don’t like sitting up here because it’s like being in a fish bowl—on display fot the world to see. And sometimes people really do stop and look in. (Cale says to just out-awkward them, which I haven’t tried yet.) I’d much prefer to be at the table in the back, tucked behind the bookcase. Hidden.
Brene Brown, who has shaped a lot of conversations we’ve been having in the last several months, talks about courage and vulnerability and shame. She says courage is letting yourself be seen.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About how uncomfortable it makes me when I can’t control what others reveal about me. 

It’s not like I have all that much to hide. And in a lot of contexts I share too much. But in some ways I am a very private person. What I do reveal to people I reveal because I trust them. I trust them with myself.

I think people don’t understand this sometimes. They think because I’ve said it out loud to them that it must be public knowledge. (What is more likely is that they feel they know me better because of this detail, and so share it with others simply because they want others to know me as well. But that’s harder for me to understand.) So they’ll tell something about me to one of their friends—something I might not choose to share.

And that freaks me out!

It makes me feel extremely vulnerable. 

Brene also talks about how fear makes us want to make the uncertain certain. Yikes. I so want to have certainty, clarity, assuredness. But, really. I don’t want to live in such a way that uncertainty is unwelcome. Can I just sit in the unknowing? Because there is something magical about mystery. Like how I get pissed if someone tells me how a film ends. Don’t spoil it!

So, back to being seen.

I can’t control what other people say about me or how they feel about me.

I can’t guarantee that people will like me.

What this points to is the fact that I might carefully craft the image of myself that I portray. Or at least I try to. But then I think about my dear friend who says he can tell within one minute, with one exhale or one glance from me, exactly what mood I’m in.

Ok. So maybe I’ve made far too big a deal out of this hiding myself business.

And, well. This is my year of EXP. Experience, exploration, expression. And I think with expression might come exposure.

So, we’ll see … 

We’ll start with sitting at the fish bowl today.

Photos by Brit Hanson