When It Hurts to Be Seen: The Crisis of Being Real

We live in a time where everyone is talking, but almost no one is being met, or truly able to meet.

It isn’t just because of phones or screens. It’s because somewhere along the way, contact became dangerous. Being seen began to feel like exposure. Honesty began to feel like confrontation. And relationship, the living current between beings, became something we manage instead of something we inhabit.

Our ability to connect hasn’t disappeared. It’s atrophied. When a muscle goes unused, it shrinks. When a culture lives in fear, it forgets how to touch without harm.

We’ve learned to pathologize everything that moves through us. Every impulse, every emotion, every flicker of intuition gets filtered through diagnostic language.

We no longer ask, What is this teaching me? but What’s wrong with me for feeling it?

That reflex to analyze instead of relate turns every conversation into evaluation. It makes intimacy feel unsafe.

And when everyone is trained to self-diagnose, to diagnose others, to treat every expression as symptom, then relationship itself becomes a kind of infection we must protect ourselves from.

No wonder so many people are terrified of honesty. We’ve turned honesty into confrontation, disagreement into threat, and vulnerability into pathology.

We have inherited a world that whispers, Trust no one. Don’t walk alone. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t let anyone too close, they might be dangerous, unbalanced, or worse. It is prudent to be cautious. But what began as prudence became paranoia, and that paranoia hardened into culture.

We bring this paranoia to spaces that do not require such a thing.

The result is a civilization where everyone is scanning for danger, even in love. Our bodies tighten when someone looks too long. Our breath catches when a conversation goes unscripted. This is when it hurts to be seen.

We call it social anxiety, but what we’re really describing is the body remembering that contact has consequences.

And it does. Because real contact changes things.

Everything that exists, exists in relationship. It is the first condition of life.

Contact isn’t something you do. It’s what you are when you stop defending.

That’s precisely why it’s terrifying.

To stop defending means risking transformation. It means you might be moved, undone, remade.

True contact asks everything of us: honesty, humility, permeability. To stay in relationship when it would be easier to withdraw is holy rebellion. Each act of contact is a small restoration of the world.

Because when we turn toward each other instead of away, the field begins to repair. When we speak truthfully without diagnosis, the sacred risk becomes holy ground. Every honest conversation that survives discomfort keeps the world from breaking a little further.

This is what Feral Power IV: True Contact is for. It isn’t about perfect communication or emotional comfort. It’s about re-entering the current of life as part of its movement, not apart from it. Learning how to stay in reciprocity instead of recoil. Learning to stay oriented inside the conditioned swirl of fear and defense.

We don’t fix the world by escaping it. We restore it by coming back into relationship. We begin Wednesday, November 12th. Join us.