What Are We Hiding When We Are Hiding?

I’ve been thinking about hiding.

Not physically disappearing.

The quieter kind.

Keeping the song in the folder.

Keeping the photograph on the hard drive.

Keeping the opinion to yourself.

Keeping the version of you that wants something larger conveniently theoretical.

Being present, but somehow never completely available for observation.

And I keep coming back to the question:

What exactly are we hiding when we are hiding?

Because sometimes we say we are hiding from other people.

Their judgment.

Their laughter.

Their rejection.

The possibility of being misunderstood.

But I’m not sure that is always the whole story.

Sometimes I think we are hiding something from reality itself.

The untested version of you is very difficult to defeat.

There is a strange safety in potential.

If I never release the song, then technically nobody has rejected the artist.

If I never make the film, the filmmaker remains potentially brilliant.

If I never start the business, the entrepreneur remains potentially successful.

If I never ask, the answer has not technically been no.

If I never step forward, I can preserve the fantasy that I would have succeeded if I had.

Potential is beautiful that way.

It is almost impossible to criticize because it has never had to survive contact with evidence.

And perhaps that is one of the things we hide:

the possibility of ourselves from the inconvenience of becoming real.

Reality has terrible customer service.

It asks for drafts.

Attempts.

Mistakes.

Embarrassment.

Revision.

Proof.

Fantasy, meanwhile, is happy to approve everything immediately.

Being seen turns possibility into information.

The moment you show something, reality begins answering.

People respond.

Or they don’t.

The thing works.

Or it doesn’t.

You discover that you are better than you thought.

Or considerably worse.

Usually both, depending on the hour.

But something important has happened.

You now have information.

And information changes you.

This may be why hiding can become so attractive.

Hiding preserves certainty.

Visibility introduces data.

And data is dangerous to identities built entirely from assumptions.

Maybe we are hiding from the death of an old story.

There are versions of ourselves we maintain long after they stop being accurate.

The shy one.

The misunderstood one.

The person who could have done great things.

The person nobody recognizes properly.

The person waiting for the right opportunity.

The person who will begin when life becomes less complicated.

Some of these identities may have once protected us.

But eventually protection becomes architecture.

Then architecture becomes a room.

Then one day you realize you have decorated the cage.

And perhaps coming out of hiding requires something more uncomfortable than confidence.

It requires allowing an old explanation of yourself to become obsolete.

The person you are becoming may require the person you have been explaining to lose authority.

There is also the fear of being accurately seen.

Being misunderstood is uncomfortable.

Being understood can be terrifying.

Because if somebody sees what you actually want, what you actually care about, what you actually hope to become, you lose plausible deniability.

You can no longer pretend you don’t care.

You can no longer call the dream “just something I’ve been thinking about.”

You have declared a direction.

And declaration creates a strange kind of accountability.

Not to the audience.

To yourself.

Once I say:

I want to make art with my life.

then suddenly certain ways of spending that life begin looking suspicious.

That is the problem with truth.

Once noticed, it becomes extremely difficult to put back into storage.

But hiding is not always cowardice.

This matters.

Not everything private is afraid.

Seeds are hidden.

Drafts are hidden.

Pregnancy is hidden before it is visible.

Ideas sometimes need protection from premature explanation.

There are parts of us that deserve to develop without spectators.

There are things that become weaker when exposed before they have acquired enough structure to survive interpretation.

Privacy can be incubation.

Silence can be construction.

Mystery can be intentional.

Not every locked door contains fear.

Some contain work.

So perhaps the useful distinction is not:

Am I hiding?

Maybe it is:

What is this hiding protecting?

Is it protecting something that is still growing?

Or something that refuses to grow?

Is it protecting peace?

Or preserving avoidance?

Is it keeping the world out?

Or keeping evidence from getting in?

I think I have hidden in usefulness.

There is a particularly sophisticated kind of hiding available to capable people.

You can become extremely busy doing things you are good at that prevent you from confronting the thing you actually want.

It even looks responsible.

You work.

You solve problems.

You help people.

You build things.

You answer messages.

You make money.

You become increasingly competent.

And because none of it looks like hiding, nobody asks where you went.

Including you.

But productivity can conceal absence just as effectively as isolation.

You can become visible everywhere except inside your own life.

Perhaps the opposite of hiding is not exposure.

It is participation.

Not telling everybody everything.

Not becoming permanently available.

Not converting your entire interior life into content.

Just participating honestly enough that reality gets to answer you.

Make the thing.

Send the message.

Say what you mean.

Apply.

Ask.

Publish.

Leave.

Begin.

Allow yourself to acquire evidence.

Some of it will hurt.

Some of it will embarrass you.

Some of it will reveal that the thing you wanted was not actually for you.

And some of it may reveal something far more dangerous:

You could have been doing this all along.

Maybe that is what scares us most.

Not that the world will prove us incapable.

But that reality might expose how much life we spent negotiating with a door that was never locked.

So I’m trying to ask a better question whenever I notice myself disappearing.

Not:

Why am I scared?

But:

What am I preserving by remaining unseen?

And does it still deserve protection?

DAVIEY
Notes from somewhere between hiding and becoming.