Being Seen

The thing you think you want isn’t often what you want.

When I graduated high school, I was so ready to go to college.  That wasn’t because I had a bad high school experience.  Quite the contrary!  I had good friends, an active social life, and although I was never the most popular I was well-liked and respected.  Yet I always felt out of step with my peers.  I always seemed to be thinking or wondering about different things, reading books no one else wanted to read, developing behaviors and hobbies that everyone seemed to view with bemusement but that it was clear they didn’t understand and perhaps even found odd.

I hoped college might prove the antidote to that out-of-step sense.  And oh, it was.

I found my people: people who cared about books the way I cared about them, who understood my silly literature jokes, professors with rigorous intellects and an abundance of grace for eager students, the nerds and the misfits and Christians both like and unlike me.  I thrived.  Even on the most challenging days I was so full of joy. 

But the need college met in me wasn’t so much a need about people or books.  It was a need to be known.

I suspect everyone has this need, to some degree: the degree to be seen and understand in a particular way, perhaps in a way that matches our understanding of our secret and most hidden selves.  In high school I felt both acknowledged and liked, but perhaps not known.  It is why my dearest friendships in college emerged from what felt like an audible click: the sound of someone finding the same thing funny, or the tangle of a delicious and deep conversation, or a shared glance across a room.  It is  why I fell so completely in love with my then-boyfriend, now-husband so immediately: here was a person on earth who understood me in a way no one else ever had.

But I didn’t know it could happen with a career, too.

I stumbled into my career by accident.  It’s what I always hoped to be doing—writing, teaching, leading—but when I started doing it I didn’t know that’s what it would become.  God brought me here circuitously, and over the years I have fallen more and more in love with my work.

I have probably fallen too much in love with my work.

I work hard.  I work late.  I will take opportunities when they are often.  I frequently go above and beyond.  Part of this is because I believe doing my best where I am is an act of service of God.  Part of it, in recent years, has probably been a way of working through the grief over my mother’s death.  I’ve told myself that I want to do this because I want to grow, because I have the ability, because I like challenging myself.  All true.

But I’ve only realized recently that work is also a place where I feel seen.

It is a place where people recognize strengths I used to not know I had, and where my sense of humor resonates, and where my heart for people seems to matter.  It is a place where my unique mix of skills and abilities finds some purchase,  and where I have been appreciated in a way that makes me feel like the me I know myself to be. 

And it has surprised me, all these years later, to realize that want still exists in me: to be known and understood.  It surprises me that it hasn’t gone away, perhaps because I am always growing and changing and I am wanting to be understood as the now me that I am rather than a person trapped in amber. 

It also surprises me because this need can only fundamentally be met in God.

People will let you down—not always purposefully or maliciously but because they’re people with failings and flaws.  Institutions will let you down.  No matter how seen or acknowledged you feel by a person or a group of people, one day that sense of being known will falter.  You’ll feel alone, or isolated or hurt, and you’ll wonder—as we often used to do on the playground, and later do in ways that we know well enough to hide—if anyone will ever see us or know us or understand us so well ever again.

God does, of course.

This is the Christ who saw Nathanael under the fig tree, who named him as honest and true.  This is the Christ who gently predicted Peter’s denial, who knew every detail of the life of the woman at the well.  This is the God of wedding wine, the God who called Lazarus back and held the grief of his sorrowing sisters.  God knows his church in the corporate sense, of course, and He is wed to that body; He also knows you, and I, intimately.  He does indeed sweat the small stuff.  He is aware of the details.  He who made you understands exactly what makes you work, what you need, what your dreams and desires and deepest hopes are.  More than anything, I wager, He wants to redeem you into your true self more and more over time.

God is always the shape of what we ache for.  Our longings outline His absence more often than not.  When we want to be known, what we want, I suspect, is to be known by God—and yet we turn our time and energy instead to the places and the things we suspect might see us better, might make us seem more validated.  It is a practice of increments, years, and decades to keep up the practice of turning to Him instead, to recognize that our practice of showing up to know Him gives Him the opportunity to show us He knows us as well as we does.

Where, I ask myself now, do I turn to find myself acknowledged, affirmed, seen?    If God is not the immediate answer, I have work to do.  But the question that comes before that is often simpler if harder to answer: what do I say I want, or what do I pursue or value, that I pretend is about something else but really is about meeting that desire to be known? 

The more honest I am, the freer I am to fulfill that longing in the most appropriate of places.