Being Seen Is Not the Same as Being Available

That's something that's been on my mind lately, now that I've been back to publishing and sharing content regularly for a while. And it took me longer in life than it probably should have to really get it, mostly because so many people think these two concepts are interchangeable.

If you’re visible, especially online, you also have to be open to unlimited interaction. If someone notices you and decides to reach out, you must respond. If someone sees you, they’re owed some version of whatever type of access they're requesting from you.

Obviously, none of those are true statements. Still, the assumption persists. It's also especially good at attaching itself to people who create things, share unusual thoughts publicly, or otherwise exist in a way that registers as noticeable to the general public.

And for a long time, I just absorbed that assumption.

Being seen felt like a contract I hadn’t read but was somehow obligated to honor anyway. So, if someone noticed me or my work — even if I didn't particularly like the way they went about letting me know — I always felt pressure to acknowledge it, soften it, manage it, or at least do my best to understand what it meant.

I don’t confuse those things anymore, nor should you. (Setting better boundaries has been a major focus of mine lately.) And once you see the difference clearly, it’s very hard to unsee.

The Hidden Cost of Being "Approachable"

Like most people (especially most women), I was raised to think that being seen initiates a mandatory social exchange.

Attention arrives, welcome or otherwise, and now you’re supposed to do something with it. So you say thank you, even if you're profoundly uncomfortable. You engage, and you smooth the interaction out so no one involved feels awkward, rejected, or uncertain.

And the emotional labor involved in all that starts adding up, especially if you're neurodivergent or super introverted like me.

It turns neutral attention into work and presence into performance. And over time, it also creates this special brand of background fatigue that’s hard to define because it doesn’t ever come from any single interaction. Instead, it comes from the constant sense that you’re being handled somehow, even when nothing overtly wrong is happening.

That said, it's not that people notice you, because that's obviously part of the point of being a creator in the first place. It's that people so often think noticing you now means you owe them something.

Stepping Out of the Reflex

This isn't a shift that happened all at once or anything. It happened in small, unglamorous moments over the years that found me simply deciding not to do what I’d always done for a change.

I stopped replying to things that didn’t require a reply. I definitely quit preemptively explaining myself and assuming that every flicker of interest someone showed me needed to be understood, categorized, and proactively managed.

And I was pleasantly surprised at just how much quieter my inner world became, not to mention how much less interacting online took out of me. For example, there were fewer imagined conversations to sort through, and certainly fewer rehearsed responses to things that hadn’t even been said yet.

I eventually realized so much of this was never about other people at all. It was about unlearning all that early programming we're all taught and instead teaching myself to stop treating visibility like an obligation.

That said, here are a few practices that helped me make the transition, on the off chance you're going through something similar.

Let attention exist outside of the need to respond to it

It took me a really long time to get past the reflex to respond to absolutely everything someone does in response to something I might have put out there. The urge to nod, wave, clarify, or otherwise perform "niceness" for other people's comfort.

But the thing is, attention doesn’t always require participation. We're just trained to assume that it does.

Someone can notice your work, your presence, your appearance, your ideas, and none of that necessarily demands a response from you. You don’t have to turn it into a dialogue you don't necessarily want to have. You don’t even have to decide what kind of attention it is.

Letting attention exist without also falling into the need to answer it definitely feels rude at first, because we’re taught that politeness requires engagement. But it's actually neutral.

Trust me when I say you can totally decide not to answer every single outreach email you get and still have the sun come up tomorrow.

Don't make assumptions about the motives involved

I've spent a lot of time being misunderstood by others over the years, so I've become very good at anticipating motives. Sometimes a little too good.

But one thing that eventually helped was holding off on interpreting anything until there was actually something there to interpret. Interest without action is neutral, and so is curiosity without follow-through. Visibility without expectation is just visibility and nothing more.

And no, I'm not telling you that you should ignore obvious red flags when they're totally out there snapping in the breeze. I'm telling you not to invent them in advance or waste your previous energy on imagined outcomes.

In practice, this looks like letting things stay unresolved a little longer than your anxiety would probably prefer. Practice makes perfect.

Decide what access means to you (before anyone asks)

So much of my content creation-related stress over the years has come from making boundary decisions in the moment, under pressure, while someone else’s expectations are already monopolizing half the air in the room.

It’s a lot easier to decide how you're going to handle these things privately, ahead of time. For me, that meant getting clear about a few basics:

• What kinds of engagement I welcome
• What kinds I ignore without guilt
• What kinds I shut down immediately without apology or explanation

Once those decisions were made, I was able to stop renegotiating with myself every time someone crossed a line in a way I personally found unacceptable. I didn’t need a script or a justification anymore, because I already knew where I stood.

Access became something I granted deliberately, which is how it should have been all along. That alone reduced an enormous amount of internal friction.

Reclaim visibility as a choice, not a contract

I'm someone who has a real love/hate relationship with visibility and probably always will. On the one hand, I naturally want people to find, enjoy, and engage with my content. I don't like feeling obligated to grant people personal access I may not be ready for or even interested in.

For that reason, visibility used to feel like a bargain I hadn’t really agreed to. If I was seen, I also had to be willing to fling the doors open to my personal life, my inbox, and whatever else the person wanted from me. If I was noticed, I had to not only be reachable but also act excited about it.

Turns out I don't need to do any such thing, and neither do you.

You can choose to be visible without being more accessible than you really want to be. You can publish without feeling obligated to engage in one-on-one conversation about whatever you put out there (unless you want to). You can exist thoughtfully and intentionally without turning yourself into a public utility.

Really getting that straight made it possible for me to at least somewhat enjoy visibility again. Despite liking to publish online, I'm a very private person who wants to keep things that way. But it's a start.

Settling into the Difference

I want to be clear about the fact that I don’t want to disappear. I’m not interested in shrinking, hiding, or dulling myself down to avoid being noticed, either, because writing and ideas were meant to be shared, in my opinion.

But I’m also no longer interested in being endlessly available to people (and honestly, I never wanted that). I prefer to let my work speak without also feeling the need to hover nearby to manage the response.

Being seen is something I allow. But being available is something I choose.

The difference between those two things is subtle, but also unmistakable once you learn to see it. And it changes everything about how you move through the world.