The power of being seen and heard is often revealed in therapy.
If there’s a privately managed pain, a long festering secret, a quietly harboured insecurity, then sharing it can feel huge.
Being seen and heard is perhaps an easy thing to dismiss or mock. But many people, arguably most people experiencing poverty, do not feel seen or heard in their day-to-day lives. They can feel powerless and frustrated and resort to extreme measures to gain power and feel seen: violence, crime, antisocial behaviour. Therapy offers a space for being seen, (but not for violence, crime, or antisocial behaviour, just to be clear). You can say almost anything you like, and a therapist should actively listen. You have a captive and highly engaged audience of one.
Everyone wants to be seen and heard We all want to be seen and heard on some level, is my belief. And we all struggle when we’re not. When we feel ignored or misunderstood, unappreciated or invisible, there’s an impact on self worth and self esteem which creates any number of mental health issues. Primarily, rejection feels bad.
Ego is forever vital, yet often negatively misconceived. We all need a strong sense of self and identity that connects with our power to impact other people, to be seen and heard, to make a difference.
Anyone who posts anything on the internet, anyone who writes a comment under a post, anyone who scribes an entire novel, a song or a script, anyone who creates art or content or codes a program, anyone who provides a service or produces work of any kind: they seek an audience, preferably of more than one person. They want to matter. They want to be seen and heard.
The reclusive anonymous artist is an anomaly, but fascinating too in their own way. Humans are essentially given to production and reward. Confusion and contradiction can arrive with the destabilising feeling of attention, of anxiety around judgement and the idea of doing it wrong.
Not being seen and heard online
As a long-time professional one-man-band, I feel this pretty hard from time to time. Being seen can directly correlate to income.
When social media arrived around twenty years ago, there was a whole new prism through which to be seen. It was magical and powerful and offered the brain generous lashings of 'being seen dopamine'.
That prism has significantly morphed since the 2000s, but it remains gruelling and seductive. It plays to individualistic, arguably narcissistic ideas of fame, celebrity and influence.
And it still feels like a pragmatic necessity when clients mostly arrive through the internet.
If you’re employed by a large organisation, or even part of a small team, you can share the weight and there’s strength in a group, more power, more reach, more connection. Which can be both positive and negative. If you’re just one person then you’re just one person, essentially saying ‘please look at me’ all the time. It can feel embarrassing and awkward.
Social media becomes brutal and damaging when that balance of effort, care, dedication, and time, is severely out of synch with results, with audience and engagement. When the return on investment is way off.
You invest hours into something. You think intensely about it. You get attached to it. You think it should stand out among so much of the shallow mental health content you see on your feeds. You think it should matter.
Finally, you click some buttons on a few platforms and deliver it out into the world. And you run away from the desk and try not to care.
Eventually you return to check, nervous and coy, still trying not to care. The stats say suggest maybe two people skimmed it for four seconds. If they were people and not robots. If the stats can even be trusted. Who the hell really knows? The stats don't change over the next week or two.
You still try not to care, not to sulk.
But of course you care, despair, feel it’s unfair. Your whining is rhyming for no reason. You are not seen or heard. It is for nothing. Nobody cares. You don’t matter. You want to have a cry or punch a wall or something. Why won’t everyone in the world just love you?! Surely they're not doing anything. They're all just checking their phones too much. As with most subjects blogged about here, if feelings of invisibility and rejection are extended and intensified, things get can become darkly existential. What really is the point in anything?
Paying (for) attention
This is where digital platforms, primarily Meta and Google but other players too, capitalise with advertising, boosted listings, the tantalising promise of higher numbers and engagement. You have to pay for it now. It’s not free.
"You and your precious content are pathetic digits," say Google and Meta in their booming American accents. "Of course you are not seen or heard. You are a grain of sand in our vast desert, ridiculous and controlled by algorithms you will never understand!" They then laugh maniacally.
And this is a feeling life can give us outside the internet. We want to believe our thing matters more widely than it does, that we have a unique selling point (USP), or distinct competitive advantage, that we are different.
Maybe we have to, because it connects to a survival instinct. Staring down the barrel of our own mortality and insignificance is hard.
So, sigh, go on then. I will try to pay them. Meta’s ad campaign set-up is disjointed and bewilderingly difficult. I have had websites for years, run a few digital marketing campaigns here and there using AdWords and Facebook for myself and others.
The fact it is now so much harder makes me curious and sceptical. Surely it should be easier now?
Despair again. After multiple clicks pin-balling confusedly from dashboard to dashboard, it becomes clear that this is not worth the time and effort.
Accepting inattention
You are not seen or heard sometimes. Maybe most of the time. Accept the control of algorithms you will never understand, the impossible chaos of it all. Attention is probably overrated anyway, potentially a little embarrassing, potentially even dangerous in a world of cybersecurity threats, deepfakes and extortion.
This is all ok. This is life. Swings and roundabouts. Dumb luck often plays a hand, but is rarely credited.
Sometimes you are seen and heard. And of course it's important to be seen and heard by the people who really matter in your life. But sometimes it will feel like you're not, like you're small and invisible, like you just can't be understood, and there will be confusion, contradiction and pain. Don't feel embarrassed about feeling frustrated, about caring. It is good to care. Anyone can feel this sense of isolation and rejection at any point in life, and it's never fun. Patience might eventually pay. But accept the unpredictable weather of being seen and heard. Breathe, trust, buy some advertising if it's easy enough, maybe book some therapy to get it off your chest. (Look at me, internet. Buy my thing. :)
