Feeling Seen

I sometimes joke that my favorite holiday is my birthday. Maybe that sounds a little self-centered, but it’s the one day a year when you hear from all the people you love. It’s also the day I feel the most seen. Reading messages from friends and family, opening the gifts they picked out, and noticing the energy they put into my birthday party or into making me feel special is my yearly reminder that I have people in my life who truly see me.

But as much as I love my birthday, I’m lucky to feel seen every day. My high school best friend will sit on a three-hour FaceTime with me to analyze the same situation for the 415,268,637th time because she knows that’s the way my brain works. My college best friend brought me a homemade brownie the last time we hung out because she knew I’d want a sweet treat after our walk.

Sometimes I feel obsessed with thinking or talking about relationships but maybe what I’m really fascinated by is being seen. When we say we want to be seen, what we really mean is that we want to be known, and when we say we want to be known, what we really mean is that we want to be loved.

Early humans drew on cave walls not just because they didn’t have a local Restoration Hardware but because they understood something fundamental: to be human is to need witnesses to our lives. Art is a bid for connection. "This is how I see the world. Does anyone else see it this way too? Do you understand me better now?"

I think it’s hard to feel seen for certain qualities in yourself if the other person doesn’t also possess them to some extent. A college soccer player can appreciate the skill of a pro soccer player in a way that casual observers cannot. This pattern extends beyond skills to character traits. Someone who is deeply generous will recognize and appreciate generosity in others in a way that more self-centered people cannot. It’s tempting when someone doesn’t see you clearly to blame yourself: "I'm not X enough." But maybe the problem isn't with you, the other person lacks the capacity to see that quality. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's colorblind. My brother told me that he only understood what a good doctor our mom is after he went to medical school.

This might seem counterintuitive because you’d think that being around people who are drastically different from you would make your traits stand out more. But there’s a difference between being noticed and being seen. A fellow artist doesn’t just compliment your work; they identify the choices you made and the skill behind them. When your effortlessly stylish neighbor admires your sweater, it feels more meaningful because she sees not just the sweater, but your taste. Being truly seen is not just recognition; it’s connection.

This framework helps explain why some friendships feel deeper than others. The more dimensions along which someone can see you the deeper the relationship becomes. In friendship, we gather these glimpses of ourselves from different people—one friend sees our humor and taste, another our ambition, another our vulnerability, like reflections in a series of mirrors. But in love, we often want a single mirror that shows everything at once: complete understanding. It’s likely too much to ask of any one person, which may be why we keep searching, hoping someone will prove us wrong.

We often develop crushes on people who embody qualities we see in ourselves but haven’t fully embraced. It’s like our hearts sending up a flare, calling our attention to our path to self-actualization. Recognizing this dynamic can shift how we approach relationships. I’ve noticed that many ambitious people treat dating like another achievement, chasing the “best” partner the way they chased the top school or the perfect job. But there is no objectively “best” person. Connection isn’t a checklist of status markers—“man in finance, trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes”—because unless those traits align with the parts of yourself you most want to be seen for, they won’t bring real fulfillment. Instead of asking, “Is this the best person I can get?” we might ask, “Which qualities in myself do I want to be seen for, and does this person have them?”

We hold on to the people who have seen us not just because they know us, but because, in some small way, they confirm that we existed at all. There are versions of ourselves that only live in their recollections, in the way they glance at us across a room, in the way they laugh at a joke we haven’t even finished telling. We want to be seen not just to feel understood, but to know we were once exactly as we hoped to be, at least in someone’s eyes. Like writing our names in sand. We were here.