Be honest, what are you afraid of?

Letters From The In-Between: Be Honest, What Are You Afraid Of?

​Vanessa Santos

Hola {{ subscriber.first_name }},

I wrote this from bed. I got a concussion in Medellín.

Listen to letter #13 (and hear my inner thoughts), on Spotify or Apple 🎧

Not from anything dramatic, I was walking with my phone in my hand, trying to find the right words for a LinkedIn post about joining the Founding Board of Wellness For The People. I was excited, distracted, and I walked straight into a cement awning that was protruding from a wall. Everything went dark. My phone flew out of my hands and landed a few feet away. That's how hard the impact was.

And I said nothing. 😞

My friends only saw the phone fly. I followed them to the market in silence. Even in deep pain, even as the light inside the market made my head spin and the nausea started rising, I brushed it off. Minimized it. Waited until my body gave me no other choice before I finally said something.

And even then I made it small. Even then I said it like it wasn't a big deal.

But it was.

Because I had just hit my head against cement and my first instinct was to protect everyone else from knowing.

I have been doing this my entire life.

I was twelve years old the first time I learned that being seen was dangerous.

My uncle's wife decided early that I was a problem. My body was developing and she made sure I knew she noticed. She made comments about how I looked, how I carried myself, what I wore. Constant cutting delivered like observations, not cruelty, which made them harder to notice and to name.

I remember standing at the mirror, crying, asking my body not to grow. Asking my chest to stay flat and my curves to disappear so she would stop looking at me that way.

And there was something else. I would see things. Feel things. I told her once that I saw sadness and gray around her. I didn't have the language for it then, I didn't know what clairvoyance was, didn't know I was reading energy the way some people read text. I just knew I felt things other people didn't seem to feel and saw things other people didn't seem to see.

She made sure I understood that was also wrong.

So I learned to hide it. All of it. The body. The knowing. The intuition that was trying to protect me my whole life. I buried it so deep that even in adulthood, when I would sense something troubling in someone close to me, I would ignore it. Double down. Work harder to prove my loyalty. Do more, give more, because I had been taught that what I saw and felt and knew was the problem, not the thing I was actually seeing.

Being fully seen, I learned, equals being too much.

I have spent decades deconditioning that lie.

But the silence started before my uncle's wife.

I was the eldest. And I learned early what that meant, not just responsibility, but invisibility as a strategy. I grew up in a home where small things could become unnecessarily explosive, where the safest thing I could do was make myself perfect and make myself small. Don't call too much attention. Keep the peace. Disappear just enough that nothing ignites.

I was also a survivor of things I didn't have words for yet. Things I was embarrassed by. Things I said nothing about because saying something felt more dangerous than staying quiet.

And yet before all of that I was the loudest version of myself you've ever seen.

I wrote scripts. I wrote plays, poems. I performed with my siblings. I acted, I danced, I created entire worlds out of make believe because it was my gateway out of the reality I was living in. That little girl was not quiet. She was full. She was expressive. She was already a storyteller.

And then the eldest daughter had to grow up. There was no room for games or dreams. There was a family to support, a job to get, a role to play that had nothing to do with who she actually was.

So I let my dreams go silent.

I let myself go silent.

And I got so good at it that many years later, standing in a grocery store in Medellín with a concussion, my first instinct was still the same one I learned as a little girl.

Say nothing. Make it small. Keep the peace. Don’t be the girl who needs attention.

After Medellín, after thirteen women in one house sharing beds and meals and vulnerable truths, I realized something. We are all doing this. Every single one of us: brilliant, capable, visionary women, moving through our lives with one hand slightly covering ourselves. Afraid to take up the full space our dreams require.

Afraid of losing our people if we outgrow the version they fell in love with. Afraid of being called too much. Afraid of not being enough. Still waiting for someone to validate the vision before we'll let ourselves fully claim it.

And what I know now, at the cost of a concussion and a lot of years of deconditioning:

You cannot build something the world can see while you are still hiding from it.

The prescription you've been given, the specific vision, the particular idea, the exact thing that keeps circling you and will not leave you alone, it was not given to you so you could keep it in a closet.

🖼️ You are the work of art.

Art is subjective. So are you. So are your ideas. And you don't keep art in a closet.

You let it be seen.

Seen, as you are, right now.

Because I have spent months in this newsletter feeling you. Reading your replies. Sitting with your stories. And what I know with everything in me is that the thing standing between you and the life you can feel but haven't fully stepped into yet is not strategy. It's not timing. It's not money.

It's permission to be seen before you feel ready.

I'm going to keep writing until you believe it.

Last week's letter #12, I wrote from Medellin and it didn't include an audio. Here it is.​

Until the next letter.

xo, Vanessa

P.S. I have 2 Decision Sprint spots left this month. Ninety minutes. Just us. You walk away with a deeply personalized roadmap: your ideas, your next steps, your prescription, on paper. Book your spot →

P.P.S. The Table's April cohort has one seat left. May is now open. The room where your idea stops being a secret and can be seen. Claim your seat →

These letters are for women and allies who refuse to erase themselves on the way to success.

But if it is, welcome to the syndicate.