Seeing and Being Seen

This is a rough sketch I did of a potential logo for my social media. I liked it well enough to try to make a second draft, though I haven’t yet made final draft.

Performance in public is a tricky beast. I’ve been thinking about this— about getting feedback for the things I do, and about how that feedback interacts with my motivation for doing things. I’m running late, so this is going to be a very short blog post, but: IMHO, the best way to perform is to see your performance as a gift from yourself to your audience.
If you start to see the performance as a way of getting something from your audience, you are going to get in trouble. Because once you start feeling emotionally attached to a certain audience reaction, you will get stuck in a pattern where you do whatever it takes to get that reaction, and then you’ve lost control of your life.

And this is how it relates to seeing and being seen: if you see performance as a means of getting a certain kind of feedback, then you will withhold the parts of yourself which you think the audience will find less-acceptable— you prevent yourself from being seen. Also you don’t see the audience as real people— they’re just vending machines for the kind of feedback you want.

If, on the other hand, you choose to be vulnerable, to set out the performance as a gift, you will let the broken parts of you be seen, and potentially be judged harshly. But that also frees you to see the audience members as real people. Perhaps they weren’t in the mood for that kind of gift today. Perhaps someone thy love just died. Perhaps a million things could have happened which are the reason why you didn’t get the feedback you would have liked this time.

And on the other hand, you get to recognize all the weird variables that could lead to positive feedback. Maybe they just found a new, awesome friend and were in a great mood because of that. Maybe they slept especially well last night, or just got over a major illness. Or maybe they were in the perfect mood and this gift was the one they could really use, and their feedback doesn’t mean that you’re amazing and will never mess up again or else you’re a failure; it means that you’re a human who tried and who should keep trying. (Which is true no matter what kind of feedback you get, just to be clear.)

Footnotes: I did not come up with these ideas solely by myself. I loved this podcast interview with Tyler James Williams on NPR, and I loved this podcast interview with Ashley Hess on Steven Jones’ podcast. The Ashley Hess interview was especially helpful for clarifying some thoughts which had been swirling around in my head for a while about this.

This is the second draft of the logo. There are SO many things about it that I don’t love, but there are also a couple of things that I do love— the color of the hair; the fact that the boat really does kind of look like a boat. The important thing to me right now is that I keep trying.