Childhood convictions shape our adult lives, often without our knowing it. They live quietly under our awareness as we choose a profession, a partner or even how we spend our free time. Our child self often creates a kind of cure for what they feel needs correcting. It is formed when we have limited power, when our resources for self-protection haven’t yet developed.
I was doing dishes on an ordinary Thursday afternoon. Sun streaming through the kitchen window. My hands in warm sudsy water. That is when the thought occurred to me: “Well, you’re eighty-two. I guess you’ll always want to be seen.” And in that instant, an old motivation was as plain as day.
All human beings want to be seen.
But what I felt was different.
My need to be seen was formed at a young age, a cure created by my little girl self who thought if someone saw what was happening to her she would be rescued.
That belief has lived beneath my choices, beneath my writing, beneath my wanting to be known. My need to be seen was never the whole of what moved me. Something in me has always wanted to create, wanted to be of service. But that need to be seen ran underneath my choices, unspoken, lending an urgency to my work.
As I recognized that, a pressure inside me began to let go.
Visibility alone was never going to be enough. The right people would have had to not only see but also be willing to take action. Being seen is not the same as being protected. That truth arrived with grief, and also with a strange kind of freedom.
What is left now, as this motivation loosens its grip? At first it felt like an emptiness. An absence where something dense and urgent used to live. But sitting with it longer, I have come to call it something else.
Space.
Under my striving was also my desire for contact with others — to meet, and be met. That longing comes from my soul. And my soul needs only the joy of connecting to the world, to others and to myself. Souls want to live a life that is part of something larger. Mine is no exception.
That is the whole of it.
This soulful desire for connecting is why creating still moves through my whole body, from my chest outward, even after fifty years, even after books, retreats, a film, and more. Not because I need to be seen. No. Because something true wants to meet something true, and every poem, every page, every painting is simply another place where that can happen.
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I feel such tenderness toward my child self, who, with so few resources, found a way to create a remedy. I am grateful for her ingenuity. The rescue I wanted as a child never came. But her longing to be seen led me to something I could not have imagined back then. It carried me into the world, where I touched others, and met myself.
Perhaps each of us has a remedy that once helped us but has outgrown its usefulness. And when we are ready we will see it for what it is. We may also discover that it has blessed us in some way. A child’s cure can bring about an unexpected outcome. Living within that cure can move us to claim our own gifts and talents.
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A note as I publish this:
So here I am, one week out from Paintings, Poetry and Pausing, doing the dishes, making beds, and writing this blog. I still catch myself focusing on the number of attendees as proof I am being seen. Now I understand where this comes from. A little girl’s wish to be saved from harm. I can hold that awareness without being driven by it. Knowing this opens my heart to being with the people who will share the museum experience with us. On October 7, we will meet — truth meeting truth, soul meeting soul.
That will be enough.