When people pay attention to you, what do you feel?

The chatter in the room pauses and all faces turn toward you. You react with… a raised chin and a smile? A gulp and a shrink? A “Pardon me” and a dust cloud as you make a beeline for the parking lot?

Whatever your reaction, the mechanisms around being seen were likely set in motion in childhood. We grow up with default habits, including our reactions—unless we do the work to examine and shift the stories the mind supplies in different types of situations.

As a shy kid, and often the “new kid,” because we moved a lot, I got into the habit of avoiding attention. Combine that with my love of reading and writing and I became an adult who writes novels but hesitates at the edge of the marketplace, reluctant to step up to be noticed.

Since my first novel, Everyday History, came out in 2016 I’ve continued to write novels (slowly—I am built for depth, not speed) while not doing much to promote them. The courage to reach out, to grow an audience for my books, eluded me because promotion means being seen. Cue the old habit of retreat.

And I’m tired of it.

When my books affect readers positively and I find out about their experiences—through emails or book reviews, for example—an electrical feedback loop completes. That feeling of being seen and helping someone lights me up almost as much as the joy of writing. When my books help someone relax in a stressful time, or view their world with fresh wonder, or learn something about themself, I’m doing what I’m here in this life to do. To do more of that, I need to be willing to be seen more.

Over the summer, I hired serious help for this journey of being seen. Multiple helpers. Good ones. In response to the effort of this challenging work, I found solace in creating a cluster map about being seen.

Cluster maps make intuition visible enough to mull over. This particular cluster map gifted me with encouragement and new insights, particularly around choices. I can choose my perspectives (what is my responsibility? and what is not my responsibility?). I can choose to lean into a process of risk > revelation > recalibration, and reach for the reward of shared is squared.

After months of grappling with these issues, I’ve come to understand that the fear of being seen is a symptom of non-acceptance. The gap between who we are and who we show ourselves to be originates outside us, from our experiences in which others judged us falsely and we took those opinions on as our own, even subconsciously. False judgments include racism, bullying, and prejudice of all kinds. Unless someone actively helps a child recover, resist, and understand what is their responsibility and what is not, what is true about them and what is not, the result is an adult with some healing work to do.

The work is unification, inside and out. When I become one with myself, know myself, claim myself, stand up for myself, I am not only willing to step into the marketplace to find more people who might truly resonate with my books, I also strengthen my ability to stand up for others.

What might you discover if you wrote a word or two in the middle of a page and explored with the circles and lines of a cluster map? You might find aid in your fingertips that your mind didn’t know.

===

Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more.

Read more about: Cluster Maps