There are two ways to be recognized for your work.
People can know it — they admire what you made, the finished thing. Or they can see it — they recognize what it actually took out of you to make it well. Most of us get plenty of the first and almost none of the second, and we feel that gap even on the days we can’t name it.
I felt it sharply last month. Someone told me my work was great. I said thanks, smiled, moved on with my day like a normal, well-adjusted adult — and something quietly closed behind my eyes anyway.
I recognized that exact motion sitting across from Cat for this Field Note.
What she told me — about a teacher who saw her at eight years old, decades before anyone started calling her work great — is the audio story below. It’s one of the clearest examples I’ve come across of what being seen actually looks like, and what the rest of us settle for instead.
I walked away wanting to ask everyone I know the same question, and I’m asking you too, wherever you’re reading this.
Who has actually watched you do the reaching, back before there was anything finished to clap for?
If a name came to mind, go act on it. Tell them what you’re building. If nobody came to mind, that’s just data worth sitting with.
Being known by a lot of people and being seen by even one are two completely different kinds of full. I’ll take the second any day, even though my entire business model runs on the first.
I’m still figuring out mine, for the record. Someone introduces me before a talk and calls me a photographer, and I let it stand, every time, because photographer is the word nobody argues with. The truer word is heavier — a body of work, a title I’d actually have to defend instead of carrying it around like a laminated badge. Haven’t said it out loud yet. Give me time?
Cat wants a room where caring this much is just the point, no apology stapled to the front of it. So do I. And if you’re still reading, guessing you do too.
P.S. Save September 26th.
A full day Field Notes workshop in NYC. Info and registration here.
A room built to hold what usually stays invisible. Strangers meeting each other as people instead of titles. Enough of them in one place that something shifts by the end.
