Are People Seeing All of You?

As I've written about before, I'm comfortable having the answer.

Give me a problem, a gap that needs filling, and I'll step in, happy to help. Not because I have to but because I want to. It comes easily. It feels like me.

Being on the other side of it doesn't.

When someone offers me help, something in me tightens before I've even decided how to respond. Not because the offer isn't kind. Because receiving it means there's a gap I couldn't fill myself, and for those of us who have built an identity on being capable, that admission doesn’t come easily.

Giving lets me stay exactly who I've always been, useful, the one holding things together. Receiving makes me ask ‘if I need this, what does that make me’.

But if you only ever give, nobody ever meets the part of you that needs something. They meet the version of you that's useful to them, capable, fine, always able to help. That version is real too. It just isn't all of you. Which means you can be surrounded by people and still be essentially unknown. Never your full self.

And what you model, the people around you learn. You end up surrounded by people who've learned that needing is something to manage privately, and being fine is something to perform. Until nobody in the room is actually fully there.

I don't think the answer is to give less. It's noticing what the discomfort on the other side is asking you to admit about yourself.

Are People Seeing All of You?