On Finding Safety Being Unseen
Mini Essays on the Many Reasons I’ve Stayed Small
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1. They met in college and they married young. Since I was never told much about my father, I spent most of my youth doing what I loved to do, what I’d learned to do most: making up my own stories to fill in the gaps.
To me, theirs was a romantically tragic tale: They married early because I was on the way; their interracial relationship throwing my mom's stepfather into a tailspin, one that ended their relationship when I was just a year old.
In the first picture I ever found of him, I'm an infant, my mouth wide open in anticipation of the spoonful of food his hand is preparing to deliver. It’s just his hand, though, nothing else. Several years later — but over 12 years ago now — I would find him on Facebook, that artificial, flat universe of human relationships. For the first time, in that profile photo, I saw his face.
I never did add him on Facebook and he didn’t add me; I still haven’t heard his side of the stories I’ve conjured to explain away his absence. Because even after I saw his face, the only thing I knew for sure was something my grandma told me when I was 10 years old: “He walked away from both of you,” she said. “When he and your mom got divorced, he told her he never wanted anything to do with her or you ever again.”
2. I have vague recollections of my grandpa; the pot bellied man with whom I spent much of my early years. He was my grandmother’s husband, my mom’s stepfather; a disquieting presence whose anger and violent outbursts allegedly drove my uncles, my mom’s brothers, to leave home in their early teens and not return until after his death.
I say “alleged”, but I believe it. Not because I remember witnessing this same rage myself — though he still had a gruff exterior, I remember my grandpa being gentle, playful even, with me — but because that was the basis of nearly every story I was told about him after he died:
He was angry, a drunk, a racist.
The most generous and most often shared description of him being that he was a living embodiment of the fictional television character, Archie Bunker — a personality most widely known for his bigotry, his temper, the eventual cultural icon status he made of the “angry white male”¹.
I can’t count how many times I’ve been regaled with stories of my grandpa’s irascibility, of his prejudiced demeanor and beliefs, then quickly reassured, “Oh, but he loved you though.” For a long time, that felt like a balm — that this man that I had only ever understood as having loved me, I then understood actually loved me in spite of myself. What a gift; such generosity!
It was only as I got older that I recognized I didn’t gain anything from his willingness to look away from everything he hated in me, in people who looked like me.
“I’ve always imagined that must be a lot of pressure for you,” a friend once told me as we talked about my family. “To be half Black, but always white enough that no one might notice.”
3. I was home alone with him, and I woke up soaked — not just from the cold wet of my own urine, but with terror.
I was six-years old and this wasn’t the first time I’d wet the bed — the first time I’d fallen asleep so deeply, that I’d felt fear in my little body so strongly, that that same body betrayed itself; keeping from me the most basic of human signals — but it was the first time it had happened while my mom wasn’t home.
Here’s what I remember: his eye rolls, his grumble that I was too old for this shit, the way he tore the sheets from the bed as if they were infectious and shoved them into my chest.
“Don’t you cry,” he forewarned me, a thick finger pushing against the skin between my eyebrows. “You don’t have a reason to cry.”
And so my face — that part of me, at least — stayed dry.
“Don’t you cry,” he warned me, a thick finger pushing against the skin between my eyebrows. “You don’t have a reason to cry.”
4. I wish I remembered his name. Wish I knew why he said it. Wish I had known what to say. Even still, I fall silent looking back on the memory.
I remember where I was — the climbing tower in the playground corner of my small elementary school in Glendale — and I remember him: older, taller, curly hair, olive skin. I think his name was Andrew? I didn’t know him so much as I knew of him in the way that you always know the kids in the grades above you. You look up to them, right? Literally and figuratively.
When he first said the word, I didn’t know he was talking to me. I turned to track his voice and found him staring in my direction. It was the first time I’d heard it, and I had to wrap my mind around what he meant, that it was directed at me, that this was something said not with the usual playground jest, but with venom.
I clocked the vitriol in his voice, the snarl in his smile. I knew, even before I knew, that calling me by this word was his way of cutting me down to size, though I struggled to understand why he felt that he needed to. The only explanation I can give for my response — which is to say, no response at all — was that I was frantic, doing the mental gymnastics to understand his unwarranted hatred toward me and somehow still land on my feet.
My chest still tenses when I revisit the memory; the words getting stuck before they can reach my throat. I wish I’d been brave enough not to swallow them down then — to swallow them down since — when I didn’t know how to volley that same vitriol back his way.
5. His eyes flash up at me in the rearview mirror and I turn quickly, facing the window to my right. He smirks, knowing I can’t escape his gaze, his teasing, his quizzing.
“What’s 7 times 8?”
I try to ignore him; try to will him to lose interest and ignore me.
It’s not that I don’t know the answer, it’s that I’m tired of being tested; I am tired of the incessant need to prove that I am smart enough — compliant enough — to someone who is not my teacher, not my parent, not anyone of actual significance to me.
It’s not that I don’t know the answer, it’s that I’m tired of being tested; I am tired of the incessant need to prove that I am smart enough — compliant enough . . .
He is just a man in a relationship with my mom, who thinks that gives him access to my attention. To be fair, despite my disinterest, it seems that it does.
“Jenna,” he says, a new sharpness in his voice. “Answer me.”
I want to sink into the seat; I want to disappear.
“56,” I say, my voice just barely above a whisper.
6. I’m reading a magazine, trying my best — as always — to ignore his advances; his bids for attention.
“Whatcha readin’?” he asks, and I answer him plainly, like an adult placating a child, instead of the 12-year old that I am trying to ward off a grown man.
“A magazine.”
He pokes at my side and pulls on my hair, all the while getting more irritated because he can’t seem to bother me. (He can, but I am determined not to show it.)
When at last he grabs a pen and draws a line through the page I’m reading to get a rise out of me, it actually works. I am annoyed, frustrated, angry even. I turn to him, my usually wavering pubescent voice sounding steely: “Do not touch my things.”
His reaction, though it stuns me, is also somehow exactly what I expected.
He pulls the magazine from my hands, his voice rising, heads turning, as he reminds me that
he is the adult
how dare I talk to him like that
I don’t have “things” because I don’t have money
I am a disrespectful little brat
On and on, until he runs out of steam. I’m reminded why I usually just don’t speak.
I stare ahead as he yells, feeling the eyes of everybody on me, willing somebody to step in — but they are as quiet as me.
7. “Hey gorgeous,” he says, stepping into my path as he walks toward me on the wide sidewalk. I offer him a weak smile — enough to keep most men happy; enough not to hurt me — but I don’t say anything as I try to widen my berth around him.
He continues to move closer, following the movement of my body like a magnet. I can’t repel him no matter how hard I try. I feel my body heat with adrenaline as I work out what to do next; as I scan for anyone around me who might notice I am uncomfortable, I am being cornered, here in broad daylight.
“I’m just trying to go to lunch,” I offer, a softball of information I hope will help him recognize I am just another person with plans that don’t involve him.
“Can I come?”
I laugh uncomfortably, and I immediately hate myself for it. “No, just a quick lunch by myself.”
I should’ve told him I was meeting someone. My mind isn’t strategizing my own safety fast enough.
I walk around him and he trails after me, occasionally calling out questions, comments on my body, as I continue down Colorado Blvd. He knows I’m uncomfortable, that much is clear — and he wants me to know that he wields that power; that he’ll decide when I can feel safe again.
I eventually turn right as I pass by the Paseo, forgoing the route I had planned and losing him in the crush of the lunchtime crowd. I lean against a wall and shake.
8. “What has attention cost you?” she asks, and so many small moments — memories I thought had sifted into the unreachable recesses of my mind — flood to the surface.
She watches my face carefully, but I stay quiet. “You’ve had so many experiences where it might not feel safe to settle in your body; so many memories that speak to other people’s privilege being weaponized against you on a micro level — no wonder you feel disconnected.”
My response is immediate and familiar: throat tightening, eyelids batting back tears. I want to answer her, but I am choking on my response. Why, even in this moment, in this space that I know to be safe — that I am paying for so I have someplace safe! —do I still feel I need to shrink down? To hold back?
My therapist looks at me kindly, but intently through the computer screen.
“What would happen if you gave your younger self the attention she always deserved?”
Hat tip to
of for inspiring the structure of today’s essays with her gorgeous recent post, I Am A Country of Wants.
Idea: List the stories that are still running your life. Do you know what they are? I bet you do: The experiences, the memories, the moments that might’ve just seemed like blips, but that stuck in your psyche like a splinter? Are you willing to dig them out? To look at them? To see how you show up when they’re no longer stuck in you?
Anecdote: For the last five weeks, I’ve been doing a summer challenge in To Be Magnetic, a membership that provides workshops and hypnosis meditations for rewriting unhelpful inner narratives. The objective of the challenge — and all of TBM’s workshops, really — is to identify and articulate a “block” that is keeping you from taking action and living authentically (i.e., manifesting the life that you want), and slowly dismantle that story before later defining and reinforcing a more empowering belief in its place.
I’ve been exploring the block that it’s not safe to attract attention to myself, because it’s so clear to me how keeping this belief on my subconscious hamster wheel has kept me from reaching for, pursuing, receiving so much of what I desire in my life — not least of which is to write my stories, and have those stories read widely by people like you. But I think what was even more surprising (and perhaps even more powerful) for me in this process was discovering how much tenderness I felt toward the part of me who has long believed that block was true; who had developed and clung to it in an effort to keep myself safe over the years.
When I dug into just a few of the stories behind why I’d stayed small in so many areas of my life, it just made sense — and I felt so grateful to the protector part of me that found a way to move through life with what seemed like greater ease and more safety by shying away from attention.
Gratefully, I don’t think I need that protection anymore. I feel so much more solid in my sense of self and in my ability to be seen after this five-week challenge, even if that means I open myself up to criticism, judgment, or any other unwanted regard by actually sharing my opinions and offerings (and otherwise just existing). While I’d rather not encounter “bad attention”, of course, deep down I believe I could handle it. Though I don’t yet fully trust that I can be seen and still be safe, my faith in that feels so much stronger.Inspiration: “The most effective marketing strategy is simple: develop the confidence and safety in your body to publicly be more of who you really are and less of who the world has conditioned you to be.” - Amy Lea
Reading this was like having a a finger pressed onto a muscle knot that has been nagging but unobvious; achy and relieving. Thank you for so generously sharing he(art), and for the nudge. I know the moments that quickly came up will be finding their way through my pen soon. 🤍
This is so well done, Jenna. Your writing is so beautifully done. You are honest, thoughtful & you put us right there with you. So much gratitude for this.