June 2, 2026 • 38 mins
Do you feel lonely even when you’re surrounded by people?
Does it sometimes feel like nobody “gets” you?
Do you worry that if people really knew you they wouldn’t stick around?
On today’s episode, I’m exploring the wound that so many of us carry (especially women) which is a fear of being truly seen.
If you share this wound, you likely don’t have a fear of being visible. You might even strive for visibility in the form of affirmation and praise. You’re probably regularly celebrated for your efforts, your achievements and maybe even your looks.
And still you quietly wonder: does anyone even like me?
I’ll share my journey to healing this hidden wound and offer some simple, inexpensive and even free healing tools.
Including my book-writing course at a discounted rate.
Code: GIFT
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story, pimecast.
Good job. Really pick up.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The pieces of your life, pull them back together with
the word you write. All the beauty and peace and
the magic that you'll start too fun. When you write
your story, you get the words and said, don't you
think it's time to let them out and write them
down and cover it's all about and write, write your story.
(00:32):
Write you write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about this contrast that exists between
being visible and being seen and how I think sometimes
we conflate these words with each other. We assume that
when I'm visible, it means I'm seen, and we assume
that being seen is the same as being visible. And
(00:58):
I want to talk about the difference between these two
words and these two states of being and the reason
why this is important, and that's what I want to
talk about today is the reason why this is important
is because if you are visible and you think that
means you're seen, you may find yourself feeling lonely over
and over again, even though you're in situations where you're
(01:20):
surrounded by people who love you, or people who care
about you, or people who you know admire you or
are interested in what you have to say. And so
it's important to understand the difference between being visible and
being seen. And this is something that I'm learning in
real time in large part because finally, finally, finally, I
took the leap and I am doing the challenge that
(01:43):
I have had in my brain for over a year now.
It's embarrassing to say that, but it really has been
over a year to just get over myself and get
on Instagram and every day recorded talking to camera video
and post it on the freaking thing without worrying about
what's going to happen, without worrying about the outcome. I
have been thinking of doing this forever. I've felt inspired,
(02:03):
I've felt pulled, I felt called to do this, and
I have resisted and resisted and resisted at every single turn.
And I finally just took the leap and started doing
it a little over a week ago. So I'm about
halfway through the challenge right now. And if you don't
follow me on Instagram, you can go find me. It's
just at Ali Fallon alll Y fall On and you
can see what I've been doing over on Instagram. It's
(02:25):
not like anything earth shattering or life changing, except for
that for me, it is utterly life changing. And this
is what's so cool about it is. This is why
I want to talk about the difference between being visible
and being seen, because I'm realizing as I moved through
this challenge that I actually don't have a fear of
being visible at all. In fact, in many ways, I
think the reason why I was invited into this challenge
(02:49):
is because I have a deep fear, as many of
us do, of being seen for who I really am
and how I really am in this exact moment. And
so because of that fear, I have compens and in
many cases overcompensated, with being visible. I think this has
to be true for so many women, and not just women,
but women especially because of the way women are viewed
(03:09):
in society. I think many of us have overcompensated. We
have hopped over this wound of being seen with the
performance of being visible, and so we've achieved a lot
in our lives. Many of us have been on stages,
We've accomplished things, we get recognized for our achievements. We
(03:31):
have awards. We have people in our lives who adore us,
who look up to us, who admire us, who are
interested in what we have to say or what we've done,
or who want to be like us, who are emulating us,
and yet deep down we have this fear like if
you only knew who I was, if you only knew
what I was really like, if you only knew what
I was really thinking right now, the ways that you
(03:53):
would change how you think about me and many of us,
I think, feel a deep unsafety to let our go
down and truly allow ourselves to be seen. As long
as we allow ourselves to be visible but not to
be seen, we will find ourselves, I think, feeling empty,
feeling lonely, and feeling really lost inside of a life
that doesn't feel like hours. Okay, before I dive deeper
(04:16):
into this concept, I want to just share where this
challenge came from and how I finally moved through the
resistance to convince myself or to give my body the
safety that it needed to do what I knew I
was supposed to do or being called to do inspired
to do. I, like I said, have had this challenge
(04:37):
on my mind for more than a year now, which
is slightly embarrassing to say, just because Wow, that's how
big the resistance has been. I felt inspired to do
this thing, which is always in my mind an indication
that there is a growth edge, there's something here that's
available for me. You're inspired to start a business, or
inspired to start a school like we did my mother
(04:58):
in law's house next door. Or you're inspired to get
on Instagram and open your mouth and speak, you know,
talking to camera videos. Or you're inspired to go on dates,
get on a dating app. You're inspired to have a baby,
You're inspired whatever it is for you, whatever you feel like. Gosh,
no matter how much I try to put that thing
out of my mind, I can't seem to let it go.
(05:20):
It's just kind of they're nagging at me. My belief
is that this is your unconscious telling you there's something
here for you. And so this idea of doing a
thing on Instagram had been nagging at me for a long,
long long time, and I had been, you know, knowing
it was back there, but like wriggling my way out
of it. I would do it for a few days
(05:42):
in a row, and then I would fall off the map,
and I would tell myself. Oh, it's because I'm busy.
It's because I have kids. It's because I can never
catch a quiet moment to myself. It's because my body
is revolting against me right now. It's because I'm sick.
It's because you know, I'm not feeling good today. And
all of those were perfectly valid reasons, by the way,
for not doing it. And yet, and yet, at the
same time, the invitation stayed there. It stayed true, It
(06:06):
kept pulling me in, it kept inviting me to come
back to it. And a few weeks ago, probably six
or eight weeks ago, I went on a double date
with my friend Ruthie and her partner Eric, and we
sat at this taco restaurant and eas Nashville that we love,
and we just sat and chatted for hours. It was
so nice to just be with another couple and just
(06:27):
talk about life and let your guard down. This is
not something that Matt and I get to do all
that often, because I feel like our lives at this
point revolve around having two young kids, and so we
don't get to just sit and chat for hours at
a time. But we got to do this with Ruthie
and Eric and Ruthie and I got to talking about
Instagram because she also has a presence on Instagram. She
(06:48):
is someone who I've always described as being the exact
same person on Instagram that she is in real life.
Like you see Ruthie on Instagram and you think, like,
she's so happy, she's so joyful, she's got so much
life inside of her, or she's so loving, there's no
way that that's real. And then you meet her in
real life and you're like, oh no, that's exactly who
she is. This is one thousand percent Ruthie is who
(07:08):
she is online and offline. And so we were talking
about Instagram and I was telling Ruthie, I'm like, I
think my toxic trait is that I could just as
easily delete my Instagram account and live a private life
and be anonymous and never record another video. I could
just as easily do that as I could also as
I also feel this tug, this inexplicable tug to get
(07:33):
over myself to pick up my freaking phone, to get
on Instagram and just record videos and leave them there
without any expectation of what's going to come from it,
and I talk myself out of it. I was telling her,
I talk myself out of it because I tell myself, well,
Instagram is this, and Instagram is that. I have all
these judgments about Instagram. I don't want so much have
(07:54):
judgments about people who are on Instagram because I use
Instagram and I find the content. They are often extremely
inspiring Instagram in many ways, and the people who I've
met there has changed my life. This is just one example,
but I follow many people who have moved through deconstruction
from Evangelicalism or from maybe Mormonism or another kind of
high control religion, and who inspire me all the time
(08:18):
by just their sharing honestly about what they're going through
or what they're learning or what they're reading. And that's
just one example of ten I could give of ways
that I find community on Instagram and I find connection
there and I see myself in these people, and I'm
so grateful that they took the risk to share their
real lives with me and to speak up about what's
(08:38):
going on with them. And so yeah, every person on
Instagram who's vulnerable and real and shares their real life
is an inspiration to me. And without the platform of Instagram,
I wouldn't have access to that so there's that piece
of it, But then there's also this other side of
me that I think feels like, oh, the algorithm, I
can never figure out how to negotiate with it, or
(09:00):
how to get what I you know, to get a
video to do what I need it to do or
want it to do or whatever. And so the struggle
is real with that feeling like this tension between being
visible and being seen. Am I going to just show
up on Instagram and be who I am? Or am
I going to try to be as visible as possible
and get every real to go viral and try to
(09:20):
figure out what the algorithm wants from me? And I
think this was the tension that I was feeling that
made me feel like I could just delete the whole
thing and forget about it and move on with my
life and be perfectly happy. In fact, maybe even be
happier if I just gave up on the idea of
Instagram altogether, because this run around of trying to be
(09:41):
visible was literally killing me from the inside out. And
so Instagram was the perfect mirror for me to see
the ways in which I was keeping myself stuck, in
the ways in which I was keeping myself in this
prison of visibility. It's like, if you're going to continue
to focus on this strategy, the algorithm, and none of
(10:02):
these things are bad inherently bad, they're amoral, they're neutral.
But for me and where I am in my growth edge,
it was like life was saying to me, God was
saying to me, my creativity was saying to me, My
subconscious was saying to me, Hey, if you're going to
focus on the strategy and the algorithm and how to
be how to be as visible as possible, you're gonna
(10:26):
hate your life. And the more you do it, the
more you're going to hate it. And it's just not
going to work for you. It might work from the
standpoint that you might actually hack the algorithm, you might
actually get a viral real you might actually be visible,
but being visible in that way is never going to
touch that hunger that is inside of you that you're
(10:47):
trying to touch. It's never going to satisfy that thing
that you're trying to satisfy. What you're really craving is
to be seen. And at the same time that you're
craving it, you're also freaking terrified what it would feel
like to be seen, especially on a platform like Instagram
where the critique comes in in real time, and the
critique comes in from people who are also wounded and
(11:09):
also terrified of being seen, and also would prefer you
in your performance over your vulnerability. Vulnerability is extremely attractive,
but it also opens you to attack. And so I
could feel my system pingponging back and forth between feeling
(11:30):
like I can't keep doing Instagram the same way I've
been doing it. It's it's literally suffocating me. I feel
like I'm trapped in this horrible creative prison where I
don't even get to be creative. I don't get to
express from the deepest part of who I am. Instead,
I'm like, what's the most viral topic, what's the trending,
what's the music that I'm supposed to use? How do
I edit this thing to make it catchy? How do
(11:51):
I catch how do I do a viral hook? How
do I whatever? All the things? And I was so
trapped in that, and it was suffocating me. And yet
I was also terrified to step into my truth, to
step into my power, to really show up on Instagram
and to meet whatever was going to come on the
other end of that. So I'm telling Ruthie all this.
(12:13):
She's like, I will do a thirty day challenge with you.
Let's do it together. This is like eight weeks ago,
mind you so, and I told you I'm only halfway
into this challenge. So clearly eight weeks ago, whatever conversation
Ruthie and I had was a kickstart in the right direction.
I think she and I both did. I don't know,
I'd have to ask Ruthie, but we did. Like I
did a handful of videos, We took some time off,
we tried to do it again. We came back, I
(12:35):
fell off the wagon, didn't finish the challenge, and then
I picked up the Artist's Way. I've talked about this before,
so you know I'm going through the Artist's Way again.
I talked my entire family into doing the Artist's Way
(12:56):
with me. So we're going through this twelve week program together.
We're writing morning pages every day. There's an exercise that
Julia Cameron asks you to do where you write out
a list of things that you would like to do
but you've been blocking yourself from doing them. They can
be very simple things. It could be things like buying
new pillowcases, something as simple as that, to something more complicated, like,
(13:18):
you know, finally confronting this person in your life about
the conflict that's been going on between the two of you.
So I wrote out my list, and number one thing
on my list was to record a talking to camera
video on Instagram every day for thirty days without worrying
about the outcome. That was an important part of the
challenge for me. So just the way the insight came
through for me was open your mouth and speak. So
(13:42):
don't over edit, don't worry about the music, don't spend
a ton of time, you know, trying to guess what's
trending or what's gonna be a viral hook, or how
this is gonna work with the algorithm. Just open your
mouth and speak and put the thing on Instagram and
set it and walk away. And so so finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally,
(14:04):
I finally started doing it, I think about two weeks ago.
So I'm halfway through this challenge of daily recording a
video on Instagram and posting it without worrying about what's
going to happen. And I'll tell you one thing that
I've noticed that has happened is the content that I've
been posting is not performing as well in the algorithm
as I'm used to. So I have like eighteen thousand
(14:28):
followers on Instagram. I'm just sharing these numbers, not just literally,
as a way to show you what I'm noticing, and
then I want to talk about it. I have about
eighteen thousand followers on Instagram and be a little more
than that eighteen point five or seven or somewhere in there.
And usually when I post a reel, like a really
great performance on a reel is somewhere around twelve thousand views.
(14:49):
A more average performance on a reel is like five
or six thousand views. I'll usually get a couple hundred
likes and maybe twenty something comments. That's pretty common and average.
And then on a reel that pops off a little bit,
I'll sometimes get like two hundred comments. That would be
like a really great performing reels if I got twelve
thousand impressions, a couple hundred likes, and like two in
(15:12):
ORed comments, and those two hundred comments would, by the way,
include me responding to all the commenters, so really more
like one hundred comments from followers. So that's what real
usually performs for me, and most of these reels that
I've posted in the last fourteen days have not performed
that well. They have, you know, somewhere like in the
thousand to two thousand tops number of impressions and way
(15:36):
fewer likes. Like some of them have like ten or
twenty likes on them and maybe two comments or four
comments or something like that. Some of them have maybe
fifteen comments. So I'm not saying this to say anything
other than just to notice that when I jump through
the hoops and do the performance, you get the incoming
response of praise, of accolades, of kind of pumping up
(16:00):
your value, of people admiring you, people being impressed, and
then when you show up in your truth you maybe
get something different. And for you, if you were to
do a similar challenge, maybe you would get something different.
Maybe you would get like one of my biggest fears
was getting just like being vulnerable and then getting like
kind of nasty criticism, which is a fear I will
(16:22):
have to face at some point too. But at this
point I've not gotten any nasty criticism. I've only gotten
kind of crickets. And I share this to say that
I'm noticing what the trade off was that I was
in I was willing to do the performance. I was
willing to be visible for the trade off of receiving
(16:46):
that praise and admiration, because that praise and admiration was
doing something for me, and that is part of where
the resistance was coming from. It wasn't just a fear
of criticism. It was more like a fear of being
irrelevant or a fear of being invisible, a fear of
not being visible but being seen. Because I'll tell you something,
(17:07):
I've also gotten a handful of dms. Not crazy number.
I'm not getting like twenty dms on a reel. I've gotten,
you know, five total over the course of the fourteen
days of people saying thank you so much for sharing
your experience. In particular, there was a response to one
reel where I talked about a big failure that I've
walked through that I've talked about ad nauseum here, and
I got a couple of responses to that reel, and
(17:29):
then maybe a response to one of the other reels too,
saying thank you so much for sharing what you've been
through and then sharing with me vulnerably from their point
of view, what they've been through and asking, you know,
a thoughtful question, and that is an experience of being
seen and being met in what you're sharing. It's very
(17:50):
different than being visible. And I think for so long
I have mistaken being visible for being seen. I'm like,
see look, people have said to me my whole life, like,
you're so vulnerable online. I can't believe you're so vulnerable.
I don't actually think what I have been doing has
been vulnerable. I think I have been willing to jump
through whatever hoops I needed to jump through to be
(18:11):
visible for the trade off of praise and admiration, for
the trade off of likes and views and comments. And
I have been unwilling to show up in my vulnerability
and to truly let myself be seen, out of a
fear of criticism, out of a fear of invisibility, out
fear of feeling irrelevant, feeling like, you know, I'm not
(18:34):
making an impact, And just noticing this is just one
moment of noticing that I've had in a handful of
these that are like big epiphanies for me that helped
me to understand a why I was being invited to
do this challenge in the first place, and b why
I felt so much resistance around it, And what this
(18:56):
challenge is offering to me is something so much more
valuable than likes and comments and views. It's offering to
me an opportunity to heal that wound, an opportunity to
learn how to stand in my truth, how to stand
in my authenticity, how to stand in my alignment, how
to open my mouth and speak what is going on
(19:17):
for me today without worrying about praise or accolades or
comments or likes or views or who's interested or who
likes me, or who thinks I'm great, or who's pumping
me up or any of it. An opportunity to really
show up in my authenticity, regardless of the outcome. And
(19:38):
so I think this is a big part. I was
telling my husband last night because he was like, how
is your thirty day challenge going? And I was like,
it's good, you know, It's what it's tricky for me
to I'm realizing how much weight I was putting in
the visibility because it's hard for me to put effort
and energy into something even where I'm being utterly myself,
(20:02):
but where I don't feel like I'm getting that payoff.
And it's like it's illuminating for me what I was accepting.
I don't know if this makes any sense, but it's
illuminating for me what I was accepting as payment for
my performance. And this experience is showing me, oh, actually,
(20:24):
it's shifting me from an meeting external validation to being
satisfied with internal validation. Like I did it. That felt
really good. I posted that video. I said what I
needed to say. I didn't sugarcoat it. I just spoke
from the heart. And five hundred people saw it. And
you know what, five hundred people is a heck of
a lot of people. And maybe some people didn't like
(20:46):
it and they didn't say anything, and that's fine. And
maybe some people just saw the first ten seconds and
scrolled on, and that's also fine. And I do know
that there have been at least a small handful of
people who have been really impacted by what I've shared.
So the other thing I said to my husband is
that I'm not a dumb dumb Like, I know what
(21:07):
works on Instagram, and I know that this content is
not optimized for Instagram. So do I feel like if
I optimize this content for Instagram, if I spend more
time editing or you know, put a hook at the beginning,
or you know how to better cover on the video
that it would perform better, probably, but that wasn't the
(21:27):
point of the challenge. And so I'm willing to forego
the added followers or added impressions or added likes or
extra comments or all. I'm willing to forego all of
that visibility in favor of just the simple act of
being seen. And I just started to think about this.
(21:50):
I'm like, I wonder how many of us are trading
off being seen for being visible? Like what we desperately
want at the core of who we are is to
be seen and to be understood, even just by ourselves.
I think this is why writing is such a powerful
tool is because it is impossible to show up to
the page every day. This is why Morning Pages and
Julie Cameron and the Artist's Way and Lama and all
(22:11):
of these people who talk about just getting your butt
in the chair and getting your writing done. This is
why this practice is so powerful and life changing and transformative.
Is because it is impossible to show up to the
page every day and not see yourself. It is like
looking in a mirror, and you cannot look in the
mirror every day and not truly see yourself for who
(22:32):
you are, like all your flaws, all your imperfections, all
your messiness, all of you. And it's so terrifying and
also satisfying at the same time to just see yourself
and just admit to yourself what's true. One thing I
noticed that happened for me is that as I shared
about my failure on Instagram, it didn't get like a
(22:55):
bunch of admiration and accolades and likes and comments and whatever,
but it did really leave this weird pressure that I've
had on myself that how do I explain the pressure?
It's like this weird pressure that like, if anybody knew
this about me, what would they think? You know, if
(23:15):
anybody knew how much dead I'm in, If anybody knew
how big this failure truly was, if anyone knew, you know,
listen to my judgment, if anyone knew what dumb decisions
I made along the way, what would they think of me?
And admitting on Instagram what it has really been like
and what it has felt like to move through this
process actually relieved me of that judgment and that pressure
(23:39):
and that stress. I was like, oh wait a second,
I actually can give myself a ton of credit for
how brave I've been to take this risk, knowing that
it was possible that I would fail, And look at
me moving through this failure with messiness and with grace
and with you know, I'm day by day I'm moving
through the failure. I'm doing it. I'm figuring it out,
(24:00):
and we're going to get to the other side of this.
And that's because of me. That's because of choices I'm
making and who I'm becoming in the middle of this.
And something about saying that out loud, admitting that to myself,
admitting that to the few hundred people who watched that
video was such a relief. I was just like, Okay,
we don't have to hide anymore. I don't have to
try to pretend like I've got it all together. I
(24:20):
don't have to pretend like I have all the answers.
I don't have to pretend like I know what I'm
doing in life, or I know what I'm doing with money,
or I know what I'm doing in business, or I'm
this amazing successful author like I don't have to put
on that performance anymore. I can just show up here.
I can drop my guard I can be seen, and
being seen by five hundred people is actually more satisfying
(24:44):
than being applauded by twelve thousand people. And I think
you could take that ratio and say the same for
your friend group, or your family, or the people who
are in your life on a day to day basis.
It's like being really seen and loved and accepted by
just a few people, by just two people, for who
you actually are, is going to feel way more satisfying
(25:05):
than impressing twenty five people, or impressing fifty people or
five hundred people, or however many people you're working so
hard to impress. And so it just got me thinking
about this contrast between being visible versus being seen. How
(25:28):
many of us are working so hard to be visible
and we're suffocating ourselves. We're living in this prison of
being visible. We're working so hard for the accolades, for
the approval, for the acceptance, for the likes, for the comments,
for the whatever, or translate this to whatever makes sense
in your world. If Instagram is not your thing, or
you're not doing social media, what ways in your life
(25:52):
are you working so hard for approval and validation that
it's like no matter how much of that you get,
it's never going to really satisfy and really touch that
place inside of you that is so hungry to just
be accepted for who you are. And imagine a world
where even just you accepting you would feel less lonely
than trying to impress ten of the most popular girls
(26:16):
in school or whatever. I mean. I say that facetiously,
but it's like, Yeah, there's that inner thirteen year old
in all of us who's still trying to be popular
in middle school, you know. And it's like, I see
adults who are doing this sometimes it's so easy to
see it in other people and the harder to see
it in yourself. But don't you know someone in your
life who you think, like, wow, she's still just in
(26:36):
middle school trying to impress the other thirteen year old girls.
Each one of us is doing that in our own ways,
and it's so exhausting, it's so horrifying, it's so hard,
it's so horrible. It drains us of all our energy.
It is the opposite of creativity. It is just no
fun and no amount of accolades, no amount of acceptance,
(26:58):
no amount of likes or comments could ever meet you
in that place. And yet you meeting you in that
place is really all you've ever wanted, and you meeting
you in that place inspires others to meet you in
that place also. And having just one or two people
in your life who really see you and get you
and understand where you're coming from and accept you in
(27:19):
all your mess and in all your glory. One or
two people like that is enough to make you feel
really loved and really supported and really taken care of
and really held and to give you all the support
and security that you need to move through whatever it
is that you're moving through. Having an audience cheer for
you is really not what it's cracked up to be.
(27:41):
In fact, it's kind of the opposite. I feel like
the more attention you get, the more pressure there is
to live up to that version of you that they're
cheering for, which is fake. It's not even real. It's
like a vapor, it's a mist, it doesn't even exist.
And the version of you that does exist right here,
right now today, is crying out for you to just
(28:03):
let her in, you know, just accept her, write where
she is, and these inspirations that we get, these creative inspirations.
In my belief are always, always, always inviting us into
a deeper communion with that version of ourselves. The realist,
truest realist is not a word, but the most real,
most true, most beautiful, most loved, most childlike version of you.
(28:29):
What would it look like for you to drop your
guard and really show her to yourself and then maybe
show her to one or two other people. For me,
this has looked like getting on Instagram every day for
thirty days. That was the inspiration that I had. That
was the way the inspiration came in, and I didn't
question the inspiration. I think if you go into something
(28:49):
like that with an expectation, oh, I'm feeling inspired to
post on Instagram every day for thirty days, this must
be an opportunity for me to expand my career or
get some brand deals, or or you know, really, maybe
I could start making money from Instagram. And you go
in with all these expectations and it's like, oh, what
a flop this was because I tried this thing and
I didn't get a bunch of followers on Instagram. But
(29:11):
if you go in with no expectation for where this
inspiration is taking you, then you're open to listen and
to see what this experience is here to show you.
And I can say that after eighteen months of living
in my resistance and really like yeah, like taking in
all of the that the resistance had to show me,
(29:32):
I'm now halfway through this challenge and I'm I feel
like the world is opening up to me and I'm
seeing clearly for the first time. And now it's like,
it doesn't matter what you do with Instagram, Ali, you
could delete it or keep it, doesn't matter. What matters
is that you keep showing up exactly as you, exactly
as you are in this moment, that you stop the performance,
that you stop working on visibility and start working on
(29:54):
what it feels like to be truly seen, And doesn't
matter how many people see. And it actually doesn't even
really matter if people see an attack, because when you
feel secure in yourself, those criticisms, those attacks are just
not as important to you. Here's another silly example. I
cut my hair this last week, which I just went
in for a trim. My daughter, who's five, had asked
(30:17):
if she could come with me to get her haircut.
She wanted to get her hair trim. She's been trying
to grow her hair out. She wants her hair to
be as long as Rapunzel, so I said, of course.
I texted my stylist and was like, hey, can I
bring my daughter with me? Could you cut her hair too?
And she was like sure. So then like a week
before we went in to go get our haircut, Nella
was like, I want to cut bangs, mom, and I
(30:39):
was like really, I'm like, my daughter's hair is like mine.
It's like naturally curly, slightly frizzy in the Nashville heat
and humidity. I was like, I'm not sure how bangs
are going to look, but I was like, you know,
more power to you if you want to cut bangs.
Let's cut bangs. And she was like, you should cut
bangs with me too, and I was like, oh, I
don't know about that. But we show up to the
(30:59):
salon and Nelle's like, are you gonna cut bangs with
my mom? And I'm like, you know what, Let's go
for it. Let's cut our banks. So I took this
little mini risk to remind myself that it's okay to
take risks, and sometimes you take risks that you really
don't know when you take a risk, how it's going
to go. It could go, well, your banks could look
really cute or it could be an epic fail. And
(31:20):
I was joking with my stylist, I'm like, cutting bangs
is like kind of a midlife crisis thing to do,
isn't it. I feel like this is perfect. It really
fits the season of life that I'm in. So Nella
inspired me. We both cut bangs, and oh my gosh,
my daughter teaches me so much. Her bangs are so cute,
Like it's whether they're straight, or whether they're curly, or
(31:41):
whether they're frizzy or messy, or whether they're perfectly styled.
You know, she got a blowout that day for the
first time, so her hair was perfectly styled and was
looking so cute, and she was looking so grown up.
But then the next day she was running around riding
her bike outside and the humidity, and so her bangs
were all frizzy and like eighties Like do you remember
those like alligator bangs from the eighties. That's exactly what
it looked like. And I was just like absolutely in
(32:01):
love with her hair and her bangs and my banks.
I was telling my husband, I'm like, I really don't
care what people think about my banks because I really
like them, like, this is just a fun experiment and
it really isn't about oh, this needs to be the
cutest haircut in the world, otherwise it was a bad choice.
I think I'm learning that a choice is just a choice.
(32:24):
And of course there's I don't even want to use
the word consequences. There's just like cause and effect. You
cut bangs and then you have bangs. It's different than
it was before. But different doesn't have to mean bad
or good. Different can just mean different, and you can
live in the different for a little bit of time
and then you can make a different choice. And I'm
trying to translate this to my creativity, to the rest
(32:45):
of my life. It's like, take risks, let yourself fail.
Not every choice that you make is going to turn
out in a way where you're like, yes, this was
exactly how I pictured it. And maybe that's part of
the fun. Maybe that's part of the goodness of it.
Maybe that's part of learning more about yourself and accepting
yourself in every season and moving through life without so
(33:05):
much judgment and without the perfectionism and oh, like it
all feels very profound to me and simple at the
same time. I hope I'm making sense. I hope this
is landing for you in some way. I hope you
can translate this to something that fits for your life.
One thing I felt really inspired to do after this challenge,
and I'm going to do it because I'm learning to
trust my inspirations. I felt really inspired to do this
even though I said I wasn't going to do it.
(33:28):
So I'm going back on something I said months ago,
but I felt this inspiration. I'm trusting it. I'm going
for it. Is to offer a book in six months
at the discounted rate that I offered over Christmas break.
So when I offered that discounted rate, I offered my course,
my signature course, a book in six months that teaches
you to write your book. Manuscript in six months is
(33:50):
normally nine ninety nine, nine hundred and nine yion dollars,
and I offered it over Christmas. For two twenty two,
I told a whole story about that. You can go
back and listen to that episode if you didn't get
to hear it. But that two twenty two was inspired
by my dad, whose birthday was on February twenty second.
My dad passed a little over a year ago now,
and I just felt like woke up in the middle
of night and felt so inspired to offer this discount.
And I said I was going to do this once,
and I wasn't sure if I was going to do
(34:10):
it again. But as I've been going through this challenge
with Julia Cameron The Artist's Way, I've been like, really,
these tools, especially the writing tools, it's such a criminal
thing to put them out of people's reach. So I
just started to feel like it doesn't matter if the
course is worth nine to ninety nine, it's more of
(34:33):
making it accessible to people. So what I want to
do is I want to share a discount code with
you that you can always use forever. It will work
until the end of time. I'm never going to change
it that you can use to buy a book in
six months for two hundred and twenty two dollars. If
you would like to buy it at full price, if
you have the means to do that, and you would
just like to do that as an energetic exchange for
(34:57):
what it's worth you, then please feel free to buy
it at that p price. But if you use the
code gift Gift in all caps when you check out,
it will take your price down to two hundred and
twenty two dollars, and I'm going to leave that code
active in perpetuity so it will always be available to you.
So if you don't have the two twenty two right now,
(35:17):
but you want to put that on your list for
things to do and you're going to do it in
six months or something like that, or if you've been
waiting to do it because you really can't afford the
thousand dollars or whatever it is for you, or if
you know someone who you're like, Wow, this course would
change their life, you can send them the link and
the discount code and let them know that I said,
this is my gift to them. It's my gift to you.
(35:38):
It is my gift to you to acknowledge the version
of you that just wants to be seen, that doesn't
need to be visible. This is not about getting a
book contract. It's not about getting famous, it's not about
being on the New York Times list. All of those
things are great and fine, but that's not really what
this process is about. What brings me back to the
(36:02):
active writing day in and day out, again and again
and again and again, is that being seen is infinitely
more satisfying than being visible. And if you're someone who
has made yourself really visible as a way to overcompensate
for this wound, this fear of being seen, then just
like welcome to the club. I mean, first of all,
(36:23):
like you're normal, because same same, same hand in the air.
But I want to invite you to take a risk
on being seen, even if you start with just being
seen by yourself. And so if a book in six
months serves that purpose for you, it is available for
you at two hundred and twenty two dollars. I would
offer it for free, but it costs me money to
(36:46):
host the course, and so two twenty two is the
price I can offer it out where I'm not losing money,
and I would love to offer it to you at
that price as a gift. And so take me up
on that. If that's something you've been dreaming about, it's
been something you felt inspired to do, and if you're
feeling resistance around it, good, that just means there's so much,
(37:07):
so much more in this invitation for you to receive
that you have not received yet. That's what that resistance means.
An equal measure to the resistance is the gift that
this offer wants to offer you, so please take me
up on this gift. Or go buy a copy of
(37:29):
Julie Cameron's Artist's Way. I don't make any money from that.
Just go click the link and go buy a copy
of that. It's like fifteen bucks. And I'm telling you,
going through this program, this twelve week program, has changed
my life and my family's life more in the last
I don't know, four or five weeks than anything else
that I've done in the last seven years. It's like,
it's so simple, it doesn't need to be so complicated.
(37:50):
Whatever it is that's calling to you, trust that do that.
I don't care if I make any money off of it.
I don't care if it's my program or someone else's
program or whatever. If you can find a writing program
that's thirty dollars, or if you can go to the
bookstore and buy artists Way, or if you can whatever
it is for you, just trust yourself enough to take
the risk and to allow yourself to be seen to
(38:12):
you and then maybe to one other trusted person. I
can promise you that that risk will be worth the
reward that comes on the other side. Thanks for listening.
I hope you find this helpful. I'm sending you so
much love, and I'll see you back next week on
the Write Your Story podcast
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story, pimecast.
Good job. Really pick up.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The pieces of your life, pull them back together with
the word you write. All the beauty and peace and
the magic that you'll start too fun. When you write
your story, you get the words and said, don't you
think it's time to let them out and write them
down and cover it's all about and write, write your story.
(00:32):
Write you write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about this contrast that exists between
being visible and being seen and how I think sometimes
we conflate these words with each other. We assume that
when I'm visible, it means I'm seen, and we assume
that being seen is the same as being visible. And
(00:58):
I want to talk about the difference between these two
words and these two states of being and the reason
why this is important, and that's what I want to
talk about today is the reason why this is important
is because if you are visible and you think that
means you're seen, you may find yourself feeling lonely over
and over again, even though you're in situations where you're
(01:20):
surrounded by people who love you, or people who care
about you, or people who you know admire you or
are interested in what you have to say. And so
it's important to understand the difference between being visible and
being seen. And this is something that I'm learning in
real time in large part because finally, finally, finally, I
took the leap and I am doing the challenge that
(01:43):
I have had in my brain for over a year now.
It's embarrassing to say that, but it really has been
over a year to just get over myself and get
on Instagram and every day recorded talking to camera video
and post it on the freaking thing without worrying about
what's going to happen, without worrying about the outcome. I
have been thinking of doing this forever. I've felt inspired,
(02:03):
I've felt pulled, I felt called to do this, and
I have resisted and resisted and resisted at every single turn.
And I finally just took the leap and started doing
it a little over a week ago. So I'm about
halfway through the challenge right now. And if you don't
follow me on Instagram, you can go find me. It's
just at Ali Fallon alll Y fall On and you
can see what I've been doing over on Instagram. It's
(02:25):
not like anything earth shattering or life changing, except for
that for me, it is utterly life changing. And this
is what's so cool about it is. This is why
I want to talk about the difference between being visible
and being seen, because I'm realizing as I moved through
this challenge that I actually don't have a fear of
being visible at all. In fact, in many ways, I
think the reason why I was invited into this challenge
(02:49):
is because I have a deep fear, as many of
us do, of being seen for who I really am
and how I really am in this exact moment. And
so because of that fear, I have compens and in
many cases overcompensated, with being visible. I think this has
to be true for so many women, and not just women,
but women especially because of the way women are viewed
(03:09):
in society. I think many of us have overcompensated. We
have hopped over this wound of being seen with the
performance of being visible, and so we've achieved a lot
in our lives. Many of us have been on stages,
We've accomplished things, we get recognized for our achievements. We
(03:31):
have awards. We have people in our lives who adore us,
who look up to us, who admire us, who are
interested in what we have to say or what we've done,
or who want to be like us, who are emulating us,
and yet deep down we have this fear like if
you only knew who I was, if you only knew
what I was really like, if you only knew what
I was really thinking right now, the ways that you
(03:53):
would change how you think about me and many of us,
I think, feel a deep unsafety to let our go
down and truly allow ourselves to be seen. As long
as we allow ourselves to be visible but not to
be seen, we will find ourselves, I think, feeling empty,
feeling lonely, and feeling really lost inside of a life
that doesn't feel like hours. Okay, before I dive deeper
(04:16):
into this concept, I want to just share where this
challenge came from and how I finally moved through the
resistance to convince myself or to give my body the
safety that it needed to do what I knew I
was supposed to do or being called to do inspired
to do. I, like I said, have had this challenge
(04:37):
on my mind for more than a year now, which
is slightly embarrassing to say, just because Wow, that's how
big the resistance has been. I felt inspired to do
this thing, which is always in my mind an indication
that there is a growth edge, there's something here that's
available for me. You're inspired to start a business, or
inspired to start a school like we did my mother
(04:58):
in law's house next door. Or you're inspired to get
on Instagram and open your mouth and speak, you know,
talking to camera videos. Or you're inspired to go on dates,
get on a dating app. You're inspired to have a baby,
You're inspired whatever it is for you, whatever you feel like. Gosh,
no matter how much I try to put that thing
out of my mind, I can't seem to let it go.
(05:20):
It's just kind of they're nagging at me. My belief
is that this is your unconscious telling you there's something
here for you. And so this idea of doing a
thing on Instagram had been nagging at me for a long,
long long time, and I had been, you know, knowing
it was back there, but like wriggling my way out
of it. I would do it for a few days
(05:42):
in a row, and then I would fall off the map,
and I would tell myself. Oh, it's because I'm busy.
It's because I have kids. It's because I can never
catch a quiet moment to myself. It's because my body
is revolting against me right now. It's because I'm sick.
It's because you know, I'm not feeling good today. And
all of those were perfectly valid reasons, by the way,
for not doing it. And yet, and yet, at the
same time, the invitation stayed there. It stayed true, It
(06:06):
kept pulling me in, it kept inviting me to come
back to it. And a few weeks ago, probably six
or eight weeks ago, I went on a double date
with my friend Ruthie and her partner Eric, and we
sat at this taco restaurant and eas Nashville that we love,
and we just sat and chatted for hours. It was
so nice to just be with another couple and just
(06:27):
talk about life and let your guard down. This is
not something that Matt and I get to do all
that often, because I feel like our lives at this
point revolve around having two young kids, and so we
don't get to just sit and chat for hours at
a time. But we got to do this with Ruthie
and Eric and Ruthie and I got to talking about
Instagram because she also has a presence on Instagram. She
(06:48):
is someone who I've always described as being the exact
same person on Instagram that she is in real life.
Like you see Ruthie on Instagram and you think, like,
she's so happy, she's so joyful, she's got so much
life inside of her, or she's so loving, there's no
way that that's real. And then you meet her in
real life and you're like, oh no, that's exactly who
she is. This is one thousand percent Ruthie is who
(07:08):
she is online and offline. And so we were talking
about Instagram and I was telling Ruthie, I'm like, I
think my toxic trait is that I could just as
easily delete my Instagram account and live a private life
and be anonymous and never record another video. I could
just as easily do that as I could also as
I also feel this tug, this inexplicable tug to get
(07:33):
over myself to pick up my freaking phone, to get
on Instagram and just record videos and leave them there
without any expectation of what's going to come from it,
and I talk myself out of it. I was telling her,
I talk myself out of it because I tell myself, well,
Instagram is this, and Instagram is that. I have all
these judgments about Instagram. I don't want so much have
(07:54):
judgments about people who are on Instagram because I use
Instagram and I find the content. They are often extremely
inspiring Instagram in many ways, and the people who I've
met there has changed my life. This is just one example,
but I follow many people who have moved through deconstruction
from Evangelicalism or from maybe Mormonism or another kind of
high control religion, and who inspire me all the time
(08:18):
by just their sharing honestly about what they're going through
or what they're learning or what they're reading. And that's
just one example of ten I could give of ways
that I find community on Instagram and I find connection
there and I see myself in these people, and I'm
so grateful that they took the risk to share their
real lives with me and to speak up about what's
(08:38):
going on with them. And so yeah, every person on
Instagram who's vulnerable and real and shares their real life
is an inspiration to me. And without the platform of Instagram,
I wouldn't have access to that so there's that piece
of it, But then there's also this other side of
me that I think feels like, oh, the algorithm, I
can never figure out how to negotiate with it, or
(09:00):
how to get what I you know, to get a
video to do what I need it to do or
want it to do or whatever. And so the struggle
is real with that feeling like this tension between being
visible and being seen. Am I going to just show
up on Instagram and be who I am? Or am
I going to try to be as visible as possible
and get every real to go viral and try to
(09:20):
figure out what the algorithm wants from me? And I
think this was the tension that I was feeling that
made me feel like I could just delete the whole
thing and forget about it and move on with my
life and be perfectly happy. In fact, maybe even be
happier if I just gave up on the idea of
Instagram altogether, because this run around of trying to be
(09:41):
visible was literally killing me from the inside out. And
so Instagram was the perfect mirror for me to see
the ways in which I was keeping myself stuck, in
the ways in which I was keeping myself in this
prison of visibility. It's like, if you're going to continue
to focus on this strategy, the algorithm, and none of
(10:02):
these things are bad inherently bad, they're amoral, they're neutral.
But for me and where I am in my growth edge,
it was like life was saying to me, God was
saying to me, my creativity was saying to me, My
subconscious was saying to me, Hey, if you're going to
focus on the strategy and the algorithm and how to
be how to be as visible as possible, you're gonna
(10:26):
hate your life. And the more you do it, the
more you're going to hate it. And it's just not
going to work for you. It might work from the
standpoint that you might actually hack the algorithm, you might
actually get a viral real you might actually be visible,
but being visible in that way is never going to
touch that hunger that is inside of you that you're
(10:47):
trying to touch. It's never going to satisfy that thing
that you're trying to satisfy. What you're really craving is
to be seen. And at the same time that you're
craving it, you're also freaking terrified what it would feel
like to be seen, especially on a platform like Instagram
where the critique comes in in real time, and the
critique comes in from people who are also wounded and
(11:09):
also terrified of being seen, and also would prefer you
in your performance over your vulnerability. Vulnerability is extremely attractive,
but it also opens you to attack. And so I
could feel my system pingponging back and forth between feeling
(11:30):
like I can't keep doing Instagram the same way I've
been doing it. It's it's literally suffocating me. I feel
like I'm trapped in this horrible creative prison where I
don't even get to be creative. I don't get to
express from the deepest part of who I am. Instead,
I'm like, what's the most viral topic, what's the trending,
what's the music that I'm supposed to use? How do
I edit this thing to make it catchy? How do
(11:51):
I catch how do I do a viral hook? How
do I whatever? All the things? And I was so
trapped in that, and it was suffocating me. And yet
I was also terrified to step into my truth, to
step into my power, to really show up on Instagram
and to meet whatever was going to come on the
other end of that. So I'm telling Ruthie all this.
(12:13):
She's like, I will do a thirty day challenge with you.
Let's do it together. This is like eight weeks ago,
mind you so, and I told you I'm only halfway
into this challenge. So clearly eight weeks ago, whatever conversation
Ruthie and I had was a kickstart in the right direction.
I think she and I both did. I don't know,
I'd have to ask Ruthie, but we did. Like I
did a handful of videos, We took some time off,
we tried to do it again. We came back, I
(12:35):
fell off the wagon, didn't finish the challenge, and then
I picked up the Artist's Way. I've talked about this before,
so you know I'm going through the Artist's Way again.
I talked my entire family into doing the Artist's Way
(12:56):
with me. So we're going through this twelve week program together.
We're writing morning pages every day. There's an exercise that
Julia Cameron asks you to do where you write out
a list of things that you would like to do
but you've been blocking yourself from doing them. They can
be very simple things. It could be things like buying
new pillowcases, something as simple as that, to something more complicated, like,
(13:18):
you know, finally confronting this person in your life about
the conflict that's been going on between the two of you.
So I wrote out my list, and number one thing
on my list was to record a talking to camera
video on Instagram every day for thirty days without worrying
about the outcome. That was an important part of the
challenge for me. So just the way the insight came
through for me was open your mouth and speak. So
(13:42):
don't over edit, don't worry about the music, don't spend
a ton of time, you know, trying to guess what's
trending or what's gonna be a viral hook, or how
this is gonna work with the algorithm. Just open your
mouth and speak and put the thing on Instagram and
set it and walk away. And so so finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, finally,
(14:04):
I finally started doing it, I think about two weeks ago.
So I'm halfway through this challenge of daily recording a
video on Instagram and posting it without worrying about what's
going to happen. And I'll tell you one thing that
I've noticed that has happened is the content that I've
been posting is not performing as well in the algorithm
as I'm used to. So I have like eighteen thousand
(14:28):
followers on Instagram. I'm just sharing these numbers, not just literally,
as a way to show you what I'm noticing, and
then I want to talk about it. I have about
eighteen thousand followers on Instagram and be a little more
than that eighteen point five or seven or somewhere in there.
And usually when I post a reel, like a really
great performance on a reel is somewhere around twelve thousand views.
(14:49):
A more average performance on a reel is like five
or six thousand views. I'll usually get a couple hundred
likes and maybe twenty something comments. That's pretty common and average.
And then on a reel that pops off a little bit,
I'll sometimes get like two hundred comments. That would be
like a really great performing reels if I got twelve
thousand impressions, a couple hundred likes, and like two in
(15:12):
ORed comments, and those two hundred comments would, by the way,
include me responding to all the commenters, so really more
like one hundred comments from followers. So that's what real
usually performs for me, and most of these reels that
I've posted in the last fourteen days have not performed
that well. They have, you know, somewhere like in the
thousand to two thousand tops number of impressions and way
(15:36):
fewer likes. Like some of them have like ten or
twenty likes on them and maybe two comments or four
comments or something like that. Some of them have maybe
fifteen comments. So I'm not saying this to say anything
other than just to notice that when I jump through
the hoops and do the performance, you get the incoming
response of praise, of accolades, of kind of pumping up
(16:00):
your value, of people admiring you, people being impressed, and
then when you show up in your truth you maybe
get something different. And for you, if you were to
do a similar challenge, maybe you would get something different.
Maybe you would get like one of my biggest fears
was getting just like being vulnerable and then getting like
kind of nasty criticism, which is a fear I will
(16:22):
have to face at some point too. But at this
point I've not gotten any nasty criticism. I've only gotten
kind of crickets. And I share this to say that
I'm noticing what the trade off was that I was
in I was willing to do the performance. I was
willing to be visible for the trade off of receiving
(16:46):
that praise and admiration, because that praise and admiration was
doing something for me, and that is part of where
the resistance was coming from. It wasn't just a fear
of criticism. It was more like a fear of being
irrelevant or a fear of being invisible, a fear of
not being visible but being seen. Because I'll tell you something,
(17:07):
I've also gotten a handful of dms. Not crazy number.
I'm not getting like twenty dms on a reel. I've gotten,
you know, five total over the course of the fourteen
days of people saying thank you so much for sharing
your experience. In particular, there was a response to one
reel where I talked about a big failure that I've
walked through that I've talked about ad nauseum here, and
I got a couple of responses to that reel, and
(17:29):
then maybe a response to one of the other reels too,
saying thank you so much for sharing what you've been
through and then sharing with me vulnerably from their point
of view, what they've been through and asking, you know,
a thoughtful question, and that is an experience of being
seen and being met in what you're sharing. It's very
(17:50):
different than being visible. And I think for so long
I have mistaken being visible for being seen. I'm like,
see look, people have said to me my whole life, like,
you're so vulnerable online. I can't believe you're so vulnerable.
I don't actually think what I have been doing has
been vulnerable. I think I have been willing to jump
through whatever hoops I needed to jump through to be
(18:11):
visible for the trade off of praise and admiration, for
the trade off of likes and views and comments. And
I have been unwilling to show up in my vulnerability
and to truly let myself be seen, out of a
fear of criticism, out of a fear of invisibility, out
fear of feeling irrelevant, feeling like, you know, I'm not
(18:34):
making an impact, And just noticing this is just one
moment of noticing that I've had in a handful of
these that are like big epiphanies for me that helped
me to understand a why I was being invited to
do this challenge in the first place, and b why
I felt so much resistance around it, And what this
(18:56):
challenge is offering to me is something so much more
valuable than likes and comments and views. It's offering to
me an opportunity to heal that wound, an opportunity to
learn how to stand in my truth, how to stand
in my authenticity, how to stand in my alignment, how
to open my mouth and speak what is going on
(19:17):
for me today without worrying about praise or accolades or
comments or likes or views or who's interested or who
likes me, or who thinks I'm great, or who's pumping
me up or any of it. An opportunity to really
show up in my authenticity, regardless of the outcome. And
(19:38):
so I think this is a big part. I was
telling my husband last night because he was like, how
is your thirty day challenge going? And I was like,
it's good, you know, It's what it's tricky for me
to I'm realizing how much weight I was putting in
the visibility because it's hard for me to put effort
and energy into something even where I'm being utterly myself,
(20:02):
but where I don't feel like I'm getting that payoff.
And it's like it's illuminating for me what I was accepting.
I don't know if this makes any sense, but it's
illuminating for me what I was accepting as payment for
my performance. And this experience is showing me, oh, actually,
(20:24):
it's shifting me from an meeting external validation to being
satisfied with internal validation. Like I did it. That felt
really good. I posted that video. I said what I
needed to say. I didn't sugarcoat it. I just spoke
from the heart. And five hundred people saw it. And
you know what, five hundred people is a heck of
a lot of people. And maybe some people didn't like
(20:46):
it and they didn't say anything, and that's fine. And
maybe some people just saw the first ten seconds and
scrolled on, and that's also fine. And I do know
that there have been at least a small handful of
people who have been really impacted by what I've shared.
So the other thing I said to my husband is
that I'm not a dumb dumb Like, I know what
(21:07):
works on Instagram, and I know that this content is
not optimized for Instagram. So do I feel like if
I optimize this content for Instagram, if I spend more
time editing or you know, put a hook at the beginning,
or you know how to better cover on the video
that it would perform better, probably, but that wasn't the
(21:27):
point of the challenge. And so I'm willing to forego
the added followers or added impressions or added likes or
extra comments or all. I'm willing to forego all of
that visibility in favor of just the simple act of
being seen. And I just started to think about this.
(21:50):
I'm like, I wonder how many of us are trading
off being seen for being visible? Like what we desperately
want at the core of who we are is to
be seen and to be understood, even just by ourselves.
I think this is why writing is such a powerful
tool is because it is impossible to show up to
the page every day. This is why Morning Pages and
Julie Cameron and the Artist's Way and Lama and all
(22:11):
of these people who talk about just getting your butt
in the chair and getting your writing done. This is
why this practice is so powerful and life changing and transformative.
Is because it is impossible to show up to the
page every day and not see yourself. It is like
looking in a mirror, and you cannot look in the
mirror every day and not truly see yourself for who
(22:32):
you are, like all your flaws, all your imperfections, all
your messiness, all of you. And it's so terrifying and
also satisfying at the same time to just see yourself
and just admit to yourself what's true. One thing I
noticed that happened for me is that as I shared
about my failure on Instagram, it didn't get like a
(22:55):
bunch of admiration and accolades and likes and comments and whatever,
but it did really leave this weird pressure that I've
had on myself that how do I explain the pressure?
It's like this weird pressure that like, if anybody knew
this about me, what would they think? You know, if
(23:15):
anybody knew how much dead I'm in, If anybody knew
how big this failure truly was, if anyone knew, you know,
listen to my judgment, if anyone knew what dumb decisions
I made along the way, what would they think of me?
And admitting on Instagram what it has really been like
and what it has felt like to move through this
process actually relieved me of that judgment and that pressure
(23:39):
and that stress. I was like, oh wait a second,
I actually can give myself a ton of credit for
how brave I've been to take this risk, knowing that
it was possible that I would fail, And look at
me moving through this failure with messiness and with grace
and with you know, I'm day by day I'm moving
through the failure. I'm doing it. I'm figuring it out,
(24:00):
and we're going to get to the other side of this.
And that's because of me. That's because of choices I'm
making and who I'm becoming in the middle of this.
And something about saying that out loud, admitting that to myself,
admitting that to the few hundred people who watched that
video was such a relief. I was just like, Okay,
we don't have to hide anymore. I don't have to
try to pretend like I've got it all together. I
(24:20):
don't have to pretend like I have all the answers.
I don't have to pretend like I know what I'm
doing in life, or I know what I'm doing with money,
or I know what I'm doing in business, or I'm
this amazing successful author like I don't have to put
on that performance anymore. I can just show up here.
I can drop my guard I can be seen, and
being seen by five hundred people is actually more satisfying
(24:44):
than being applauded by twelve thousand people. And I think
you could take that ratio and say the same for
your friend group, or your family, or the people who
are in your life on a day to day basis.
It's like being really seen and loved and accepted by
just a few people, by just two people, for who
you actually are, is going to feel way more satisfying
(25:05):
than impressing twenty five people, or impressing fifty people or
five hundred people, or however many people you're working so
hard to impress. And so it just got me thinking
about this contrast between being visible versus being seen. How
(25:28):
many of us are working so hard to be visible
and we're suffocating ourselves. We're living in this prison of
being visible. We're working so hard for the accolades, for
the approval, for the acceptance, for the likes, for the comments,
for the whatever, or translate this to whatever makes sense
in your world. If Instagram is not your thing, or
you're not doing social media, what ways in your life
(25:52):
are you working so hard for approval and validation that
it's like no matter how much of that you get,
it's never going to really satisfy and really touch that
place inside of you that is so hungry to just
be accepted for who you are. And imagine a world
where even just you accepting you would feel less lonely
than trying to impress ten of the most popular girls
(26:16):
in school or whatever. I mean. I say that facetiously,
but it's like, Yeah, there's that inner thirteen year old
in all of us who's still trying to be popular
in middle school, you know. And it's like, I see
adults who are doing this sometimes it's so easy to
see it in other people and the harder to see
it in yourself. But don't you know someone in your
life who you think, like, wow, she's still just in
(26:36):
middle school trying to impress the other thirteen year old girls.
Each one of us is doing that in our own ways,
and it's so exhausting, it's so horrifying, it's so hard,
it's so horrible. It drains us of all our energy.
It is the opposite of creativity. It is just no
fun and no amount of accolades, no amount of acceptance,
(26:58):
no amount of likes or comments could ever meet you
in that place. And yet you meeting you in that
place is really all you've ever wanted, and you meeting
you in that place inspires others to meet you in
that place also. And having just one or two people
in your life who really see you and get you
and understand where you're coming from and accept you in
(27:19):
all your mess and in all your glory. One or
two people like that is enough to make you feel
really loved and really supported and really taken care of
and really held and to give you all the support
and security that you need to move through whatever it
is that you're moving through. Having an audience cheer for
you is really not what it's cracked up to be.
(27:41):
In fact, it's kind of the opposite. I feel like
the more attention you get, the more pressure there is
to live up to that version of you that they're
cheering for, which is fake. It's not even real. It's
like a vapor, it's a mist, it doesn't even exist.
And the version of you that does exist right here,
right now today, is crying out for you to just
(28:03):
let her in, you know, just accept her, write where
she is, and these inspirations that we get, these creative inspirations.
In my belief are always, always, always inviting us into
a deeper communion with that version of ourselves. The realist,
truest realist is not a word, but the most real,
most true, most beautiful, most loved, most childlike version of you.
(28:29):
What would it look like for you to drop your
guard and really show her to yourself and then maybe
show her to one or two other people. For me,
this has looked like getting on Instagram every day for
thirty days. That was the inspiration that I had. That
was the way the inspiration came in, and I didn't
question the inspiration. I think if you go into something
(28:49):
like that with an expectation, oh, I'm feeling inspired to
post on Instagram every day for thirty days, this must
be an opportunity for me to expand my career or
get some brand deals, or or you know, really, maybe
I could start making money from Instagram. And you go
in with all these expectations and it's like, oh, what
a flop this was because I tried this thing and
I didn't get a bunch of followers on Instagram. But
(29:11):
if you go in with no expectation for where this
inspiration is taking you, then you're open to listen and
to see what this experience is here to show you.
And I can say that after eighteen months of living
in my resistance and really like yeah, like taking in
all of the that the resistance had to show me,
(29:32):
I'm now halfway through this challenge and I'm I feel
like the world is opening up to me and I'm
seeing clearly for the first time. And now it's like,
it doesn't matter what you do with Instagram, Ali, you
could delete it or keep it, doesn't matter. What matters
is that you keep showing up exactly as you, exactly
as you are in this moment, that you stop the performance,
that you stop working on visibility and start working on
(29:54):
what it feels like to be truly seen, And doesn't
matter how many people see. And it actually doesn't even
really matter if people see an attack, because when you
feel secure in yourself, those criticisms, those attacks are just
not as important to you. Here's another silly example. I
cut my hair this last week, which I just went
in for a trim. My daughter, who's five, had asked
(30:17):
if she could come with me to get her haircut.
She wanted to get her hair trim. She's been trying
to grow her hair out. She wants her hair to
be as long as Rapunzel, so I said, of course.
I texted my stylist and was like, hey, can I
bring my daughter with me? Could you cut her hair too?
And she was like sure. So then like a week
before we went in to go get our haircut, Nella
was like, I want to cut bangs, mom, and I
(30:39):
was like really, I'm like, my daughter's hair is like mine.
It's like naturally curly, slightly frizzy in the Nashville heat
and humidity. I was like, I'm not sure how bangs
are going to look, but I was like, you know,
more power to you if you want to cut bangs.
Let's cut bangs. And she was like, you should cut
bangs with me too, and I was like, oh, I
don't know about that. But we show up to the
(30:59):
salon and Nelle's like, are you gonna cut bangs with
my mom? And I'm like, you know what, Let's go
for it. Let's cut our banks. So I took this
little mini risk to remind myself that it's okay to
take risks, and sometimes you take risks that you really
don't know when you take a risk, how it's going
to go. It could go, well, your banks could look
really cute or it could be an epic fail. And
(31:20):
I was joking with my stylist, I'm like, cutting bangs
is like kind of a midlife crisis thing to do,
isn't it. I feel like this is perfect. It really
fits the season of life that I'm in. So Nella
inspired me. We both cut bangs, and oh my gosh,
my daughter teaches me so much. Her bangs are so cute,
Like it's whether they're straight, or whether they're curly, or
(31:41):
whether they're frizzy or messy, or whether they're perfectly styled.
You know, she got a blowout that day for the
first time, so her hair was perfectly styled and was
looking so cute, and she was looking so grown up.
But then the next day she was running around riding
her bike outside and the humidity, and so her bangs
were all frizzy and like eighties Like do you remember
those like alligator bangs from the eighties. That's exactly what
it looked like. And I was just like absolutely in
(32:01):
love with her hair and her bangs and my banks.
I was telling my husband, I'm like, I really don't
care what people think about my banks because I really
like them, like, this is just a fun experiment and
it really isn't about oh, this needs to be the
cutest haircut in the world, otherwise it was a bad choice.
I think I'm learning that a choice is just a choice.
(32:24):
And of course there's I don't even want to use
the word consequences. There's just like cause and effect. You
cut bangs and then you have bangs. It's different than
it was before. But different doesn't have to mean bad
or good. Different can just mean different, and you can
live in the different for a little bit of time
and then you can make a different choice. And I'm
trying to translate this to my creativity, to the rest
(32:45):
of my life. It's like, take risks, let yourself fail.
Not every choice that you make is going to turn
out in a way where you're like, yes, this was
exactly how I pictured it. And maybe that's part of
the fun. Maybe that's part of the goodness of it.
Maybe that's part of learning more about yourself and accepting
yourself in every season and moving through life without so
(33:05):
much judgment and without the perfectionism and oh, like it
all feels very profound to me and simple at the
same time. I hope I'm making sense. I hope this
is landing for you in some way. I hope you
can translate this to something that fits for your life.
One thing I felt really inspired to do after this challenge,
and I'm going to do it because I'm learning to
trust my inspirations. I felt really inspired to do this
even though I said I wasn't going to do it.
(33:28):
So I'm going back on something I said months ago,
but I felt this inspiration. I'm trusting it. I'm going
for it. Is to offer a book in six months
at the discounted rate that I offered over Christmas break.
So when I offered that discounted rate, I offered my course,
my signature course, a book in six months that teaches
you to write your book. Manuscript in six months is
(33:50):
normally nine ninety nine, nine hundred and nine yion dollars,
and I offered it over Christmas. For two twenty two,
I told a whole story about that. You can go
back and listen to that episode if you didn't get
to hear it. But that two twenty two was inspired
by my dad, whose birthday was on February twenty second.
My dad passed a little over a year ago now,
and I just felt like woke up in the middle
of night and felt so inspired to offer this discount.
And I said I was going to do this once,
and I wasn't sure if I was going to do
(34:10):
it again. But as I've been going through this challenge
with Julia Cameron The Artist's Way, I've been like, really,
these tools, especially the writing tools, it's such a criminal
thing to put them out of people's reach. So I
just started to feel like it doesn't matter if the
course is worth nine to ninety nine, it's more of
(34:33):
making it accessible to people. So what I want to
do is I want to share a discount code with
you that you can always use forever. It will work
until the end of time. I'm never going to change
it that you can use to buy a book in
six months for two hundred and twenty two dollars. If
you would like to buy it at full price, if
you have the means to do that, and you would
just like to do that as an energetic exchange for
(34:57):
what it's worth you, then please feel free to buy
it at that p price. But if you use the
code gift Gift in all caps when you check out,
it will take your price down to two hundred and
twenty two dollars, and I'm going to leave that code
active in perpetuity so it will always be available to you.
So if you don't have the two twenty two right now,
(35:17):
but you want to put that on your list for
things to do and you're going to do it in
six months or something like that, or if you've been
waiting to do it because you really can't afford the
thousand dollars or whatever it is for you, or if
you know someone who you're like, Wow, this course would
change their life, you can send them the link and
the discount code and let them know that I said,
this is my gift to them. It's my gift to you.
(35:38):
It is my gift to you to acknowledge the version
of you that just wants to be seen, that doesn't
need to be visible. This is not about getting a
book contract. It's not about getting famous, it's not about
being on the New York Times list. All of those
things are great and fine, but that's not really what
this process is about. What brings me back to the
(36:02):
active writing day in and day out, again and again
and again and again, is that being seen is infinitely
more satisfying than being visible. And if you're someone who
has made yourself really visible as a way to overcompensate
for this wound, this fear of being seen, then just
like welcome to the club. I mean, first of all,
(36:23):
like you're normal, because same same, same hand in the air.
But I want to invite you to take a risk
on being seen, even if you start with just being
seen by yourself. And so if a book in six
months serves that purpose for you, it is available for
you at two hundred and twenty two dollars. I would
offer it for free, but it costs me money to
(36:46):
host the course, and so two twenty two is the
price I can offer it out where I'm not losing money,
and I would love to offer it to you at
that price as a gift. And so take me up
on that. If that's something you've been dreaming about, it's
been something you felt inspired to do, and if you're
feeling resistance around it, good, that just means there's so much,
(37:07):
so much more in this invitation for you to receive
that you have not received yet. That's what that resistance means.
An equal measure to the resistance is the gift that
this offer wants to offer you, so please take me
up on this gift. Or go buy a copy of
(37:29):
Julie Cameron's Artist's Way. I don't make any money from that.
Just go click the link and go buy a copy
of that. It's like fifteen bucks. And I'm telling you,
going through this program, this twelve week program, has changed
my life and my family's life more in the last
I don't know, four or five weeks than anything else
that I've done in the last seven years. It's like,
it's so simple, it doesn't need to be so complicated.
(37:50):
Whatever it is that's calling to you, trust that do that.
I don't care if I make any money off of it.
I don't care if it's my program or someone else's
program or whatever. If you can find a writing program
that's thirty dollars, or if you can go to the
bookstore and buy artists Way, or if you can whatever
it is for you, just trust yourself enough to take
the risk and to allow yourself to be seen to
(38:12):
you and then maybe to one other trusted person. I
can promise you that that risk will be worth the
reward that comes on the other side. Thanks for listening.
I hope you find this helpful. I'm sending you so
much love, and I'll see you back next week on
the Write Your Story podcast
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