I had never had Reiki before. Willingly, that is. It was the fall of 2021, and I was my favorite massage therapy establishment. Someone was visiting me from out of town. Someone who often made me feel unsafe.

I had been struggling with extreme SI joint pain for just over a year at that point. It was difficult to walk. My usual massage therapist told me he thought it was energetic. I didn’t know if I believed that emotions or energy could cause physical pain, but at that point I would have done anything to make it stop and to get my freedom back.

The massage therapist I usually saw was working on my guest, so I decided to book with another therapist instead. She was known for her intuition.

The massage was so strange. She barely touched me. She hovered her hands over me while waves of emotion washed over me. At that time of my life, I rarely let myself feel those emotions. What was this person doing to me? I had never had Reiki before, and I don’t think I would have asked for it. Honestly, I felt violated. 

As she moved painful emotions around my body, she told me she had a mantra for me: “It’s safe to be seen.”

I was surprised by how angry I felt when she said this. That was not my reality. How dare she?

At that point, I had spent years fighting myself and trying to hide who I was. A former colleague once told me I was like a burning fire inside a hurricane glass. Not a candle. A fire. 

What I learned from the time I was young was that I needed to make myself small and camouflaged to be safe. I needed to be what my parents told me I should be. Smart and practical. Useful. Submissive. Productive. Thin. Beautiful but not seductive. Non-threatening.

My parents weren’t the only ones who told me this. It was whispered in the microexpressions of my friends, employers, on television, in magazines. In the reactions of strangers. In watching other women. Watching my mother. 

It was not safe to be seen.

Fast forward to 2022. I started seeing a therapist. I wanted to skip through my past and fix my present without feeling the pain of where I had come from. I just wanted to be fixed. Quickly. 

That wasn’t going to happen.

I had to look at my past and unravel. I needed to look at little me and listen to her. Apologize. Then I needed to start standing up for her. To keep her safe.

As I did the work, I was shocked at how powerful “no” felt. How powerful it felt to set boundaries. I stopped panic exercising and control dieting. For the first time in my entire life, I stopped trying to lose weight.

In 2023, I set a boundary with a person who had made me feel unsafe my whole life. The person who was in the other room when I was receiving unsolicited Reiki.

Then things got easier. I started setting boundaries with more people. I learned to have an opinion about the food I liked and didn’t like. I committed to myself that my voice mattered and that I would listen. Could this be what it’s like to have a superpower?

The more space I held for myself, the more space I had for other people. I had more empathy. I spent so many years trying to make myself smaller that I never realized how much energy it was taking to manage and suppress. 

I never could have told myself in 2021 that it was safe to be seen. Because it wasn’t. Not in the life I was living. Not in the relationships I had built. Not inside the parts of me that believed love and safety had to be earned through compliance.

Are you living your life this way?

Here are the signs.

You are anxious, sensitive, reactive, indecisive, maybe angry. You feel like too much and not enough at the same time. You organize your life around hiding. Around managing yourself. Around being acceptable. You are so tired.

You have the sense that if people knew who you really were, they would be shocked.

Not because you are bad. Because you learned somewhere along the way that it was not safe for you to be fully seen.

Not yet.

It has taken me five years to create a life where being seen feels less dangerous. Five years to bring Jessica out of the dark space in the back of the closet behind the clothes. Five years to learn that safety is not something you find by becoming smaller. Safety comes from the commitment you make to stop abandoning yourself. 

Then, eventually, safety becomes something you build by finally allowing yourself to be seen. 

You. Are. Worth. It.