When my father died, and we gathered at my grandmother’s house for the repass, older relatives who I did not remember would remind me, repeatedly throughout the meal, how quiet I was as a little girl, and how I would never speak.
I would smile and nod until I realized that my quietness as a child wasn’t a personality trait. At least not an authentic one. It was because I was afraid. My father’s verbal abuse scarred me to the point the only memory people have of me as a child was my silence.
One of my earliest memories is sitting in my dad’s car and him rapping to me the chorus from Run DMC’s “You Talk Too Much.” I wasn’t even five yet, but I was learning my voice didn’t matter. Because I talked too much and never shut up. A few years later, I became used to being yelled at, cursed out, and otherwise put down by my dad to the point my silence became a safeguard against his and anyone else’s anger and hatred towards me.
While people-pleasing kept me safe growing up in a turbulent household, it did not keep me whole. It became difficult to engage with the world around me since I kept my true self closed off, afraid that expressing a difference in opinion would lead to me being attacked, criticized, or dismissed…because it did.
Sitting in my grandmother’s house, I began to understand that my inability to speak up and advocate for myself as an adult tied directly to being a child who was bullied to the point of silence. I should have been empowered, instead, I was torn down, and I wanted to figure out the path back to my authentic self. The self before the trauma, or perhaps, now, in spite of it.
I believe this authentic self that I seek to inhabit is possible, but it’s taking work to uproot the backwards thinking I internalized. To consciously reject people-pleasing, I have to believe that my thoughts and opinions are just as valid as anyone else’s. That requires reparenting as my father’s words and actions taught me otherwise.
Leo season, with themes of creativity and courage, is a great opportunity for all of us who have dimmed our lights to practice shining out loud.
Shining Bright in Leo Season
Leo season celebrates the confidence to shine and be seen, but being seen is not a universal experience.
For many, especially women and marginalized groups, sharing oneself and one’s ideas in public is an undertaking fraught with vulnerability and risk. Being seen requires relinquishing control over our own image while managing the threat of public hostility.
But we do it anyway.
Because silence is too heavy a burden to carry when we censor ourselves.
According to astrologer Megan Rose, “The Sun returns back to it’s [sic] home sign of Leo and we enter a season of remembering who the f*ck we are when we are not shrinking, hiding, or waiting for permission from someone else…This is a time when confidence is built through taking action, and connecting with what and who makes us feel alive… even if it’s intense, hot to the touch, or uncomfortable at first.”
Leo season reminds us that confidence isn’t believing that we’re extraordinary every moment of every day. It’s trusting that our worth isn’t determined by other people’s comfort, and remaining visible even when visibility feels costly. This is an important reframing for those of us rejecting people-pleasing because it is easy to shrink away when you feel exposed and vulnerable.
There will always be people who find our brightness inconvenient, our honesty unsettling, or our presence too large for the role they imagined for us. That is the cost of being seen and not proof that we’ve taken up too much space.
Because as imperfect and awkward as it may be, it is possible to heal from the burden of being seen. It begins with valuing our own opinions over others. It’s sitting with the fact that people may not like what we said or did and that’s okay. That’s part of being visible.
Self-expression has never been about earning permission to exist. It has always been an act of defiance. Once we’ve said, written, worn, loved, believed, or created something true, we cannot become invisible again. And perhaps that’s the point.
The burden of being seen is also the privilege of being known. And we are absolutely worth knowing.
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