On Being Seen

I’m struggling to breathe in-between my sobs. I’m taking in great gulps of air, but my body won’t cooperate in this crucial moment. The solo performance I’ve spent two years preparing for is due to start right now. Part of my mind is lost to fear, the other part is having an out-of-body experience saying, “It’s ok, you’re just having a panic attack at the most important moment of your creative career.” My sister hugs me and tells me it’s going to be alright. I know there are people waiting outside. I know I’m eating into my allotted performance time, but I cannot get it together. Suddenly, there’s a loud clap in my face. 

My friend Emma, a seasoned performer, knows how to snap me out of it. She stops short of slapping my face, but the sound of her hands coming together at the end of my nose does the trick. I regain my composure and take my position centre stage, where the spotlight shines directly on me. I breathe deeply and give the nod to let the audience in. For the next 90 minutes I perform the final showcase for my masters programme assessment. And you know what? All my preparation pays off and, incredibly, I actually enjoy myself.

When the performance is over, even though it went well, I’m upset about my panic attack. I thought I had everything under control. I’d worked hard to overcome my fear of being watched by an audience, but a lifetime of avoiding exposure could not prepare my subconscious for the moment when I, finally, deliberately chose to put myself in the spotlight. In fact, the panic attack should not have been a surprise to me, because the subject of my final showcase was the question of self-limiting beliefs and how to navigate them. 

Despite this seemingly distressing beginning, I am, I promise, here with good news, a reason to be cheerful. This good news is that self-limiting beliefs, the flaws we perceive in ourselves and battle with everyday in our internal monologues, can in fact be our greatest source of inspiration. 

One could sum up the experience of my showcase performance with a neat little phrase like “feel the fear and do it anyway”. It sounds good, but to my mind that mantra suggests self-limiting beliefs are, at best, hurdles to be leapt over or, at worst, crawled under. The last few years have taught me rather than trying to “block out” or “get over” my fears, it is much more rewarding to look into their depths and go swimming in the dark. 

“Don’t worry, just be yourself!” Familiar words, right? We’ve all heard them so many times. It seems like such good advice, but in order to be yourself you need to know yourself. Therein lies in the rub. If each of us is a gloriously unique being here on earth, why is it so hard to truly be ourselves? Well, I’d suggest, being under constant pressure from external factors like familial and societal expectations is what makes it difficult. Most of us are taught to conform to our surroundings, to ignore things we find difficult or uncomfortable, and focus on what’s acceptable. This, my friends, is not a good formula for getting to know yourself. 

From a young age, I loved drawing and making things with my hands. As I matured I longed to find ways of expressing myself through visual imagery, but I didn’t know how to process my emotions. In my family, and especially at my boarding school, feelings were embarrassing. They were inconveniences to be suppressed or ignored, never discussed. Therefore, being seen to have emotional needs became scary to me. Fit in or be ejected from the tribe, was the message I absorbed early on, and history taught me that artists rarely fit in.

So, blocked by the fear of exposure, I nipped my dream of being an artist in the bud and became a designer instead. Much easier! Why? Well, because I could focus on other people’s questions, not my own. I could be the cipher that slips into other people’s worlds, barely noticed, create a visual tool to help them communicate more clearly, and then slip out the back door. Good design, as they say, should be invisible. That suited me just fine.

Then in my late thirties I began to get sick. At first I was losing vibrancy and energy, then quite rapidly I descended into severe anemia. Something needed to change. I began to investigate the relationship between my emotional and physical health. I had thought following a design career would be sufficiently nourishing for a creative person like myself. Did it matter if I was always focused on other people’s questions rather than my own? For the first time, I began to think maybe it did. Were all these years hiding behind other people’s businesses, brands and publications taking a toll on me?

Eventually it became clear that, for me, making things for other people needed to be balanced out with making things for myself. The fearful child in me was calling out for attention. So began a new journey into the unknown. I set out to get to know myself. I went to see a therapist. I started drawing and painting again. I did a masters programme in performance, and learned to visualise the terror, then the thrill of being seen. As I nourished my emotional needs, gradually my health got better and I started to thrive again. 

During these years of self-investigation I learned some surprising things: Yes, I am afraid of being seen, but I also desperately want to connect with others. The thought of people reading these words, for example, is both scary and thrilling to me. As a child I adopted extroversion to fit in, but really I’m an introvert who needs alone time to process the world around me and inside of me. It turns out what I thought was my foundational life lesson, that introversion is a hurdle to be leapt over with grace and agility, is wrong. I learned that performers are often introverts, that the artists I love share vulnerable truths, and that it’s ok to be exactly who I am. 

I now know that I’m someone who wants to be visible and invisible at the same time. I asked myself, is it even possible to negotiate such a duality? I decided yes! My fear of exposure is real, my anxiety about being seen is challenging, but it doesn’t make it impossible for me to be an artist. In fact, these emotional challenges are material I can work with. For example, I can do two years of creative research about insecurity and failure for my masters programme and still experience a paralysing panic attack before doing a wonderfully engaging performance about self-limiting beliefs. 

Each time I feel that familiar tension in my gut, when I feel like I'm meeting a brick wall that is blocking my path, instead of pushing away that paralysis, I have learned to engage with it. I get curious and ask myself, how can I visualise this feeling? As a result, I’m currently mining a rich seam of being my awkward self for new artworks. Today, in my early forties, the central theme of my personal work has become the duality between being visible and invisible. 

That is my good news, my reason to be cheerful. It feels freeing to put energy into exploring what I felt were terrible deficiencies of character. These supposed flaws are in fact goldmines. The neat and tidy conclusion of this story is not that I’ve learned to stop hiding. That is still a very strong inclination in me. But there is a happy conclusion, which is that not wanting to be seen, while also wanting to be seen, is a fertile field for artistic expression, and that is what it means to be myself.

Leonora Oppenheim
www.eliostudio.com - design, play, participate
www.leonoraoppenheim.com - earth, flesh, bone

Photo credit: “Her Need to Amplify” by Leonora Oppenheim. Trinity Laban 2019, MFA showcase performance. Photography by Enrico Policardo.