The Effort Of Hiding

By Brea Segger

A while ago, I said to someone, “I just show up as myself.”

I didn’t think much about it at the time, but the sentence stayed with me. Because I started thinking about what actually allows us to do that.

Imagine being with someone who sees you clearly. Not just the parts you’re comfortable with. The addiction. The shame. The guilt. The choices you wish you hadn’t made. The things you’re still doing that you know aren’t good for you. The parts of your life you haven’t quite figured out.

And none of it is being made wrong.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be talked about. They don’t have to tell you that they accept you. You know from the way they are with you that there isn’t somewhere else they need you to get to.

There is an enormous amount of subconscious effort involved in hiding.

We change small details when we tell a story. We explain ourselves before anyone has asked for an explanation. We make something sound less important than it was. We leave certain things out. We become slightly different versions of ourselves depending on who is in the room.

Most of this happens so automatically that we don’t experience it as hiding. We experience it as being ourselves.

But some part of us is still keeping track.

What can be said. What shouldn’t be said. What might change the way someone sees us. What needs an explanation. What we need to defend. What we hope no one notices.

I’ve watched what happens when that effort is no longer necessary.

At first, sometimes very little.

Someone says the thing they usually wouldn’t say. They don’t rush to explain it. They notice the familiar impulse to make themselves more understandable, more reasonable, more acceptable — and then, eventually, they don’t.

And over time, something else can happen.

Some of the things they have spent years fighting with begin to have less of a grip on them. An old behavior isn’t needed in quite the same way. Something they have tried repeatedly to change simply stops showing up as often.

Not because it was finally confronted.

Sometimes it was simply allowed to exist without being hidden.

I think this is part of why the way we are with ourselves matters so much in the way we are with other people.

We can tell ourselves that we don’t judge. We can learn to listen carefully and say all the right things. But another person can often feel where our acceptance ends.

If I cannot bear to see something in myself, it is very difficult to sit completely at ease when I encounter it in someone else.

Perhaps that is where some of this begins.

To see what is here. The parts we’re proud of and the parts we’d rather weren’t true. To stop requiring ourselves to become someone else before we are allowed to be fully here.

Because eventually there is less to hide.

And when there is less to hide, there is less to protect.