Making Room - Part 4: I Will Not Fight To Be Seen

Lord - I needed yesterday to calm down.  

Three people cried in my office this week.  One of them may have been me.  

I am fortunate to have colleagues that take responsibility for their stuff, but lately it has felt like we’re taking responsibility for other people’s stuff. 

“It is not your job to take on the feelings and work responsibilities of others,” I said to a co-worker and friend.  

Did you laugh at the irony when I said that?  

I am terrible about boundaries.  

When I want something to succeed, I take all that pressure on myself. 

“You’re overwhelmed because you’re taking on more than is yours,” I said to someone else.  

Again.

The irony.  

Later in the afternoon, after attending back-to-back meetings, answering 634 questions, and 1,056 messages, I stepped out of the fluorescent lights and grey halls into the real world with sunshine, fresh air, flowers, and birds that sing to you instead of asking questions. 

And I took a deep breath in.  

No more noise. 

I eased into my car and felt a cocoon of silence fall around me. 

I drove in the silence all the way home.  

And I heard you whisper, “You’re fighting to be seen.” 

And I felt that comment like a punch in the gut.  

The wrestling. 
The frustration. 
The anxiety.  
The stress.  

The wrestling....
It was familiar.  

I spent two years in a dead-end marriage and 16 years at a company wrestling to be seen,

I. 

Will. 

Not. 

Fight. 

To. 

Be. 

Seen.

I will do my job the best that I can.  

But I will not beg to be seen.  

Not again.  

And if they fail to see me - that is between you and them. 

But eventually their failure will become a decision.   

A decision about what they value.

A decision about what they recognize.

A decision about what they are willing to lose.

And that decision…

is not mine to carry.

I have carried enough things that weren’t mine.

Enough pressure.

Enough responsibility.

Enough weight that I picked up because I wanted something to succeed…

or because I didn’t trust that it would without me.

And maybe that’s the harder part to admit.

Not that people don’t always see…

but that I have been quietly trying to make them.

Working harder.

Carrying more.

Saying yes when I should have said… not mine.

That’s not leadership.

That’s fear.

Fear that if I don’t hold it all together… it won’t hold.

Fear that if I don’t step in… it will fall apart.

Fear that if I stop… I’ll disappear.

But I heard you.

“You’re fighting to be seen.”

And I don’t want to live like that anymore.

So I am laying some things down.

Not my standards.
Not my work ethic.
Not my care for people.

But the parts that were never mine to carry.

The pressure to prove.
The pressure to hold everything together. 
The need to be recognized.
The responsibility for outcomes that don’t belong to me.

YOU SEE. 

And that has to be enough.

Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Even when the room doesn’t acknowledge it.
Even when the work goes unnoticed.
Or the love goes unreturned. 

Even when I am tempted to pick it all back up again.

YOU SEE.

And I will learn to live like that is true.

There are two things that I’ve learned: 

First...

Keeping things from falling apart...that’s not my job.  
That’s your job, and it is arrogant of me to think otherwise.  

You hold the entire universe together. 
I’m just over here duct taping-tasks together and leaving virtual sticky notes in the hopes someone finds it. 

Forgive me, Lord, for my arrogance. 

Second...

I’m clearly trying to be seen.  
And being seen by you....
Is the only thing that should matter.  

And I do feel seen. 

Even when feeling seen means hearing your whispers and adjusting.