on being seen...
Dom sent me an essay they wrote several years ago called “Articulating the Current” after a class where the two of us spent an hour or so harvesting tangy hibiscus calyxes and talking in that mercurial manner, where there’s lots of looking away, looking back at one another and the feeling that time could hold the conversation for however long it needed to happen. We spent the harvest time discussing plant energetics in circles and spirals with plenty of side hallways. Gemini + Virgo cousin shit. Anyways, in the essay they explained a theory called the “doctrine of signatures” and defined the theory in two ways, but the explanation that captivated me the most was when they explained that there was “the notion that every sentient thing is venturing to convey what it carries inside of it, if only for the sake of being holistically recognized.”
As someone in constant practice of authenticity, this struck me. Authenticity for me has to be a practice because I have a deep and storied fear of being judged as inadequate. If you perceive me and I fall short then I must be bad because you see something that I missed. This lack of self trust has often manifested as motivations to be chosen and validated. This has often been catastrophic for my relationships and self-esteem because it makes it hard to show up collapsed or messy and be shown that I will still be extended grace and acceptance. However, I cannot recall a time when people-pleasing and self-contortion has ever landed me in a relationship that felt nourishing, have you?
Over the last two years, I have found myself growing impatient with the ruminations regarding the perceptions of others. During the last session with my therapist of five years, I told them when we started working together I wanted to be powerful and at that time I understood personal power as some sort of optimized self control. My redefined understanding of power is a jaw-wide-open acceptance of myself. They told me I was powerful and I believed it. When I feel my most pathetic self, I love it and feel powerful for that extension of kindness, but this feels incongruent with an old self I am mourning.
But I read that definition of the doctrine of signatures and I felt something in me shift. Perhaps it was the start of this belief: that if I show up as myself again and again and again, refusing the work of optimization for the sake of validation, I would not only begin to recognize myself but begin to be recognized by those in alignment of my greatest and highest “good” (even when I show up “bad”).
A few months ago, I was having drinks with friends and lamenting something to the group that was deeply personal, but I had tried my best to express the recalling in a “well… that’s life” kind of way. When I looked over at one of my friends and held their stare, I noticed my eyes filling and stinging with tears. I realized that their eyes were starting to shimmer and glaze too. I attempted to giggle it off, but they told me with an earnest and quiet voice, “It’s because I'm a mirror.” I held their gaze for a brief moment at the relief of being understood and met with deep empathy, before I sighed and located a big laugh to shoo it away. “Okay, okay that’s enough!” What I wish I said was, “Thank you for seeing my heart so clearly.”
Ace said Mercury in Leo “speaks with the rawness of the true self” but that it also “hides.” Mercury in Leo is a wanderer; its job while wandering is to, as Ace puts it, “Find it within [itself] to applaud, to love, to accept the self that is in the shadow.” Ace continues that Mercury in Leo natives are self-critical and fear coming off as cringey, but defines cringe as the “daunting of the self that you are not ready to share.” Part of recognizing myself has been to accept that I am someone who shares with a lot of heart. I am often critical of my sentimentality or how self-referential I can be, but writing is often one of the only corners where I dare to confront the self I am not ready to face. With each essay, letter, love note and journal entry I write myself into recognition. I write to wander, but I also write to be found.
I have been thinking about Arthur Jafa explaining in an interview with Bella Freud on her podcast “Fashion Neurosis,” the difference between a painting and a photograph being “discrepancy.” He says that a photograph has “mechanical correlation” between the photograph and reality, but a painting, since the invention of the photograph, is now forced to lean more into discrepancy– to be more than what the thing looks like… to be so much itself that you can feel it. I cannot control the perceptions of others or even the discrepancy between what they think they see and the depths that I contain, but perhaps the magic is the discrepancy- an opportunity to be felt. Working working working to contort the self for love has been thankless and deteriorating but there is something about the humiliating and delicious work of reaching and revealing myself that feels like work worth doing. I know that if I can accept me, I can accept you. If I can fight for me, I can fight for you. If I can soften to me, I can soften to you. If I can recognize me, perhaps I can also recognize you.
yours if you can see me,
Sharon/Kos