I disappeared from their field of vision

The Magic You Hide and the Magic You Show

A friend asked me this week if I was in a certain group, one of those invite only corners of the internet, and when she showed me it I saw a whole list of familiar names, people I had been woven in with once, people who, before the pandemic, would have thought of me without trying, would have folded me in without a second thought.

I was not asked. I was not invited.

And a strange procession of feelings moved through me, neutral first, or maybe that was the shock, and then the old childhood thing of being left out, and then a tender embarrassing yearning to belong, to be seen as a colleague again, and then, right on cue, the annoyance at myself for wanting it at all.

I have been walking with it for days, and here is what I found underneath all of it.

I disappeared from their field of vision.

Not because anyone pushed me out, and not because of anything malicious, but because somewhere in the density of those years I stopped showing up, I tucked myself into a corner of the world that felt safe, and the work friendships I had built through exactly that kind of showing up, the networking and the collaboration and the rooms, kept growing without me in them.

Like all things in life, there is more to the story. There always is.

Because that disappearing happened in the same season I was asking dear trusted friends who were folded into the coaching world to witness something hard, to acknowledge my fear as an Asian woman, the racism I had experienced quietly for most of my life and was finally not willing to carry quietly anymore.

My inner turmoil was loud that year, my reckoning with all of it was loud, and it was adding its own weight to an already impossibly heavy time, and what I know now is that their friendship was not going to grow in the direction I was growing, and the work was not to force it, the work was to let them go with love and for them to let me go.

I understood it, valued the ending but also felt rejected, disappointed, and confused. Nothing about relationships is precise and the messy can be slippery and hold the complexities that there are faults and no faults at all.

So I locked the door. I told myself it was protection, and it was, for a while.

I removed myself from my other coaching colleagues and friends because I didn’t want to experience this pain over and over again.

But protection has a way of becoming a smaller life if you leave it in place too long.

What I am noticing at this threshold is that the magic you hide and the magic you show are not two different magics. It is the same brightness. You either keep it behind the respectable door, where it is safe and where no one can refuse it or let you down because no one can see it, or you let it into the room and risk being refused, and risk being received, and both of those ask something of you.

I spent a long time choosing the door. The brilliant part of what I carry, the part that does not fit neatly into anyone’s comfortable version of me, I kept it tucked away where it could not be misunderstood, and I called that safety, and slowly it became a kind of vanishing.

So I began unlocking it and extending my hand. I am telling my dear friends that I am here, that I would love to be invited back into the fold, that I am open to connection and collaboration and the kind of friendship that gets built in rooms and not in corners.

And I am doing it as the whole of myself this time, not the agreeable smaller version that was easy to keep around, but the complex one, the woman of color, the daughter of immigrant parents, the coach who is done folding herself into anyone’s easier idea of her so that she could be digestible.

I do not get to know how it lands but I do get to extend the hand over and over again.

And there is something steadying in that, in remembering that the trail back to connection is walked the same way the trail out of it was, one small ask at a time, one room at a time, one moment of letting yourself be seen whole.

If you are somewhere in your own season of deciding what to keep behind the door of your inner sanctum and what to finally let into the room, the Magic and Medicine Quiz is a soft place to start. It points you toward which of the four archetypes holds the magic you have most been hiding, and it takes under a minute. It lives here soraschilling.com/quiz.

xoxo,