Spoken Word: I Am Seen and Heard
We see the phrase "you are seen, you are heard, you matter" everywhere in social media now. But do we really know how it feels? I do. For so long, I've been a ghost. A flicker in the background, a fleeting image in the periphery of people's lives. Nobody really looked, did they? They saw a facade, a veneer of who I wanted to be, who they wanted me to be. Smile, nod, laugh at the right moments—play the part, and then vanish. I perfected the art of being pleasantly forgettable. But he... oh, he sees me. When I'm with him, I can't just blend into the wallpaper. My camouflage fails. He strips me of my invisibility with a mere glance, a simple question: "How are you really doing?" He'll ask, and I'll falter. Because he's not asking to fill the silence. He's asking because he genuinely wants to know. It's unsettling but liberating. When I think something, he notices; he reacts. He catches that fleeting shadow across...