That Visibility that Makes Us Most Vulnerable

...is also the source of our greatest strength (thank you, Audre Lorde)

Hello again, friends. I want to ask how you’re doing. But that just seems an increasingly ridiculous and unmanageably complicated question. A stressful question, if one cares at all about telling the truth. Maybe even a fate-tempting question. Besides, do any of us really know how we’re doing right now? It’s a little hard to tell when everything changes faster than you can even get your syllables out.

I feel compelled to find a greeting better suited for these times. But I guess for now, I’ll just turn to truth, which is to say that I’m so very glad you’re here. For one, your being here reassures me that the cyber infrastructure hasn’t yet completely crumbled. For another, it tells me that they haven’t yet pulled off widespread censorship. And most importantly of all, it stokes my fervent hope that you’re still out there, doing your thing(s), which is a big deal when there’s so much pressure to…NOT.

Surveillance culture has a way of stripping the life out of living.

I’ve personally been feeling that pressure, friends, what about you? The escalation of hateful rhetoric, coercive carceral activity and “political” violence, which is really just…violence (because what isn’t “political” right now in America?) has me feeling increasingly vulnerable about my own visibility. Honestly, it’s scaring the stuffing out of me at moments. And it’s proof positive to the youngest, most frightened parts of me who remain convinced that the best bet for safety lies in invisibility.

My inner kid logic made sense back when I was was terrified of being flagged by school bus bullies as a queerdo-weirdo. And from the perspective of those inner kids, it still makes sense, because the authority figures of 2025 bear an eerie resemblance to the middle school bullies of yesteryear. Only worse, because they have more power which which to inflict damage.

This got really, really real for me last week, when I discovered a little eruption of anti-trans graffiti here in my own small town. Ironically, I discovered it while taking one of my not-infrequent emotional health hygiene breaks. There it was, splashed red as blood on a stone wall along a bike path in one of the bluest states in America. Vile, vulgar evidence of the virulent, violent anti-trans hatred rising in this country.

The instant my eyes took it in, my frontal lobe took a nap and left my lizard brain in charge. And my lizard brain perceived that *everyone* I passed walking on that bike path was probably a rabid transphobe who also happened to have x-ray-level ability to detect my transness. I could only have felt more exposed and vulnerable if all my clothes had suddenly disintegrated. It mattered not one jot that I regularly “pass” as cis-male¹. And it also mattered not a jot that I wasn’t doing anything to attract attention to myself. My lizard brain wasn’t about to be talked out of its panic, and it was lobbying hard for me to scurry home where I would pull the shades down over the windows and the covers up over my head. Fortunately, my frontal lobe came to before I had time to get fully pulled under.

“If you would keep your soul/from spotted sight or sound/live like the velvet mole/go burrow underground.” [Quote by Elinor Wylie; Photo by Nicholas Ng on Unsplash]

In a very strange twist of fate, the suppression of my appetite for visibility is coincidental with an unusually fertile season of positive visibility. Live story-telling and poetry reading visibility. Imminent website makeover with snazzy new photos visibility. That kind of visibility. It’s the kind of visibility I would still love-hate, even if we weren’t living in an Orwellian age of mounting terror.

I suspect that for many of us, regardless of identity, the push-pull of wanting to simultaneously be seen/heard and also to hide can actually physically hurt. It sucks the lifeblood right out of us with a tension so intensely taut, we feel sure we might snap like a dry twig.

On one side of this tug-of-war, the pull to stay safely hidden can keep us playing small for a long, long, LONG time. And the smaller the better, in the view of coercive authority, whose power depends on our absolute, unquestioning obedience. It loves nothing more than when we erase ourselves, because then it doesn’t have to the job for us.

Depiction of the model citizen, borrowed from the Project 2025 vision board.

And from the other direction, our essential self is pulling just as hard, if not harder, for us to lean into the full and visible expression of our gifts. This essential self knows that each of us has something meaningful that needs to be shared outwardly, and sometimes widely. Not simply for our own self-aggrandizement, but for a greater good. And it’s not letting it drop. In a 1977 paper titled “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde credits her daughter with breaking this down for her during a moment of hesitation about using her voice. Here’s how she put it:

…there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

Yeah. That tracks with my experience. But my experience has previously been with surviving garden-variety fears, like embarrassment, rejection or humiliation. Not with navigating the existential consequences coming to bear under authoritarian rule.

So how do we wiggle our way out from between the cover afforded by the rock of invisibility and the hard place of exposure? How do we keep from being squeezed into a pulpy mass of unlived life, unspoken words, unexpressed wholeness? Must we choose between expiration by starvation or over-exposure?

I’ve thought about this long and hard lately, friends. And here are my best-wrought answers:

1. I don’t know.

2. I sure hope not.

There has to be a better answer, hasn’t there?

When answers fall short, turning back to questions can help. Here’s another question that keeps cropping up for me during these treacherous times when some of us face criminalization simply for living as our authentic selves. I chew on this one like it’s a bit between my teeth as I careen this way then that on the continuum between mild anxiety and paralytic panic:

If I’m still here when all this smoke clears, how will I feel about the choices I’ve made?

Yes, I know friends. It’s not a comfortable question. And because we’re all unique, the answer will be subjective. We’ll answer this based on very personal choices that come from an intricate and nuanced archive of selfhood. Our answers will be driven by things like personal history, identity and its related privileges or lack thereof, and probably myriad of other complex factors.

But what’s true for all of us is that there is something that, no matter what comes to pass, will remain untouchable from the outside unless we abandon it entirely on the inside: our authentic sense of integrity.

The singular sparkle of an integrous heart.

Yet hanging onto our sense of integrity is no small feat, and I have a sinking feeling it may get harder not to leave it behind in the mad scramble for the life boats as the totalitarian equivalent of the Titanic gasps its last gurgly breath.

This is where the last-ditch wisdom inherent in 12-step recovery programs comes in handy. When it feels like we don’t know how we’ll ever keep going anywhere but down, we change course by taking things one proverbial day (or choice) at a time. At each choice point, we might consider which direction will keep us in alignment with our authentic sense of integrity. Then we make that choice. Make that choice. That choice. Choice. It really is that simple.

Well, friends. To tie this all together, I’ll turn once again to the sage and sturdy words of the late, great Black woman warrior poet doing her work, Audre Lorde:

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Photo by Sasiwimol Sangsai on Unsplash

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1. This could (and may, someday) be the subject of its very own post. I, like some other trans folks, wrestle with no small amount of guilt (not to mention other complicated emotions) about my passing privilege. Not all trans folx have or want this privilege, and I respect their choice.