On being seen
A dear friend was in town for business last week. We've known each other 25 years—a work relationship that turned into a real one somewhere along the way—and we manage to see each other in person about once a year. So dinner at The Wharf had the usual shape. Catch up on the basics, then start going somewhere deeper, the way good friends do.
Somewhere in there he said something I haven't been able to put down.
He commented that I used to be so confident. And he wasn't sure I am anymore.
He didn't say it to wound me. He didn't reach for a fix or a plan. He said it plainly, with love, the way you'd tell a friend there's something on their face. And it landed exactly where it was aimed, because it was true.
Here's the part that's hard to hold. I still walk into rooms confidently. Most people who know me would tell you I'm a confident person, and they wouldn't be wrong, but underneath that, right now, there's a current of insecurity running—and he felt it. Named it. Got it right.
Anaïs Nin wrote something in her diaries that I keep returning to:
“There were always in me two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage...and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
I don't think I'm quite her two women. Read all the way through, Nin's smiling woman is concealing despair—the smile is a cover. Mine isn't, or at least I don't think it is. When I walk into a room with eagerness and curiosity and enthusiasm, that's true. It isn't a performance laid over something darker.
And also—in quieter moments, away from the room—there's an undercurrent of insecurity that's just as true.
That's the part I'm still learning to hold. Not one real self and one mask. Two real things at once. The woman who leaps in smiling isn't lying, and the one underneath who isn't so sure isn't lying either. They're both me.
What I keep turning over is how he could see it. The people closest to me see me all the time and love me well, and still the shift stayed invisible to them—not because they weren't paying attention, but because they were too close to see it. The people who see you every week are calibrated to you. They move with you. A slow change averages out and disappears into the daily picture—that isn't neglect, it's proximity. He was holding two snapshots one year apart, and the gap between them jumped. He wasn't a better friend that night. He was just standing far enough back to see the whole.
And the gift wasn't the diagnosis. It was that he handed it to me and didn't try to take it from there. He left the work where it belongs.
There's a sutra—1.20—that I've always taught as the five yogic vitamins. The qualities that have to be present for a practice to hold: faith, strength, memory, contemplation, discernment. The first is śraddhā, usually translated as faith. But B.K.S. Iyengar reads it as something firmer—a mental and intellectual steadiness, a trust solid enough to stand on. Everything else balances on top of it.
That's the vitamin running low right now. Not my strength. Not my memory. The firmness underneath them. The steadiness my friend could feel had gone a little soft.
I don't have the through-line tied off yet. This might be the start of something I follow for a while.
For now, I'm just sitting with what it is to be seen clearly—without judgment, without rescue—by someone who only catches you once a year. It stung. And I'm grateful. Both true.