When We Can No Longer Show People Who We Are

There are times in life when we know exactly who we are, but we lose the ability to show it. I don’t mean we become a different person. I mean the parts of us that have been built over years—our experience, our confidence, our humour, our competence—become hidden from the people around us. We are still ourselves, but suddenly there is a gap between who we know ourselves to be and what other people can see.

Most of us will experience that gap at some point. It might happen after moving to a new country, but it isn’t limited to migration. Illness can create it. So can disability. Losing a job can do it. Grief can change the way we speak to people, or whether we speak at all. Sometimes it arrives simply because we find ourselves in a room where nobody knows our story. We haven’t changed overnight, but the things that once helped people understand us are no longer visible.

That made me wonder whether we often confuse what is visible with what is true. We hear an accent and think we know something about a person. We notice a wheelchair, a diagnosis, a uniform, an age, a title, and our minds begin quietly joining the dots. It isn’t usually done with bad intentions. It’s simply how human beings make sense of the world. The trouble is, people are always more complicated than the first thing we notice about them.

Larisa Vakulina gave language to something I had never really considered. She asked us to imagine carrying all our inner genius, our talents and our knowledge into a place where we simply couldn’t express them. Not because they had disappeared, but because the words we needed weren’t yet available to us. It wasn’t just a language barrier she was describing. It was the experience of still being yourself while knowing that other people could only see a fraction of who you really were.

Watch the episode with Larisa on YouTube