They Cannot See You

Don’t believe other people when they tell you who you are.

What they are really telling you is who they are.

They speak from their upbringing, their fears, their longings, the books they’ve read, their family they grew up in, the shows they watch at night. Every opinion carries the imprint of the one who holds it. Their judgments are less a mirror of you than a map of their own inner world.

They are teaching you of them, not of you.

When I read Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, one teaching split me open: don’t take anything personally.

Until then, I had been a bundle of reactions. Every opinion struck me like a knife. I twisted myself in knots trying not to offend whoever I was with.

I built my life around what others thought of me. And when I tried to ignore them, I still lived despite their opinions, which is a very different thing than being free of them.

When I launched my first business, I lived in fear of what people would say. When money didn’t come the way I’d hoped, I worried about my husband’s disappointment. Once, while giving a talk about lavender, a key ingredient in my skincare line, I choked mid-sentence in front of the room. It was a bizarre side effect of carrying so much fear about being judged.

Eventually, I understood: other people’s opinions weren’t just shaping me. They were silencing me.

It’s not about you. Nothing is about you.

What people say about you comes from their lens, their self, their story. They cannot see you clearly because they cannot step outside their own filters.

An accountant will see you one way. A yogi will see you another. A stranger on the street will see you differently still. None of them are wrong, but none of them are you.

We spend much of life finding environments that feel safe for the version of self we’ve constructed. When the environment contradicts it, we suffer. Not because we are harmed, but because we believe someone else’s vision of us is the truth.

But here’s the truth: no one can ever fully see you. At first this can feel disorienting, even lonely. But over time, it becomes liberating.

If no one can fully see you, then you are free. You no longer have to manage their perceptions. You no longer have to hold their judgments as scripture.

This is a kind of Middle Way, what the Buddha described as freedom from extremes. Not swinging between clinging to opinions and rejecting them, but walking the path of non-attachment.

You live not to uphold the projections others place on you, but to embody the truth that rises from within.

Now, there is value in hearing others — not as truth, but as information. Every opinion, even if distorted, offers a glimpse of how your presence lands in the world. You can harvest the insight without believing the verdict.

• Notice the lens. Ask: what fear, desire, or experience might this person be speaking from?

• Extract the seed. Is there useful feedback here? Is it revealing something about how you’re perceived, or about how they experience the world?

• Release the verdict. Their words are theirs, not yours. You don’t have to carry them.
  
  You are not who others say you are. You are not even who you say you are. You are what remains when the voices fall silent.
  

  I know this because I have lived both. I spent years of twisting myself to fit the gaze of others, of placating, of staying silent out of fear of being judged. I built a life out of other people’s voices, and in the process, I lost my own.
  

  And then the mirrors broke. The opinions scattered. The fear hollowed out.

  What remained was not their verdict, not even my own self-image, but the presence that endures underneath it all.
  

  That presence is the real you. The one no opinion can name. The one that simply is.