What are you ready to be seen for? 🦖

Letters From The In-Between: What Are You Ready To Be Seen For?

​Vanessa Santos

{{ subscriber.first_name }}, listen to this letter on Spotify / Apple 🎧 with thoughts at the end.

I've been thinking about dinosaurs. 🦖

I watched the documentary mini-series on Netflix this week and something about it had me wondering, not just about the past but about us, right now, in this moment of history where so much feels like it's shifting under our feet.

These creatures ruled this earth for 165 million years. They breathed, they protected, they loved, they held their ground with a kind of authority we can barely imagine from here. And then an asteroid hit and most of them were gone.

But not all of them.

🪺 Some of them went into the cave. Protected the eggs. Waited out the impact not by performing survival but by preserving what mattered most, the next generation, the thing they were building.

I've been sitting with that because so many of us are in the cave right now and we don't give ourselves credit for it. Building in the shadows, protecting the egg, waiting for the asteroid to pass. And that's not hiding, that is incubation. That is a season and it's sacred.

BUT there is a difference and I need you to feel this distinction in your body, between going into the cave to protect what you're growing and making yourself invisible so other people stay comfortable. Between strategic withdrawal and chronic self-erasure. Between honoring your season and shrinking yourself because someone in your life decided a long time ago that your fullness was inconvenient.

One is protection. The other is self-abandonment dressed up as humility.

And our nervous systems, bless them, cannot always tell the difference.

Our nervous systems were wired to protect us from predators. Actual predators with teeth.

But we are no longer being chased by a T-Rex.

We are being chased by the fear of raising our rate. By the terror of launching the product before it's perfect.

By the discomfort of advocating for ourselves in a room that wasn't built for us, asking for the promotion, respecting your cancellation policy, saying the thing out loud before we have permission.

We are being chased by the version of visibility that feels like standing in an open field with no cover, completely exposed, waiting to see what hits.

And I know the headlines aren't helping. The EEOC suing a company for a women's networking event. (it's just wild)

👉🏽 And so this is what I know from building businesses, from losing myself in one, from selling it and walking away without financial upside but with a fuck ton of lessons and the bones of who I actually am underneath all the roles I was playing: there are no better conditions. There is only now, and what you decide to do with it. We cannot predict tomorrow and therefore NOW is when you must move forward with your vision, your dream, your desire, your plan.

I didn't know what I was ready to be seen for. I just knew I was done being invisible.

The way we change it isn't by waiting until the world is fair enough for us to begin. It's by beginning anyway, imperfectly, mid-becoming, even when the nervous system is firing like something terrible is about to happen.

Because sometimes the boundary feels like a T-Rex is coming. And you set it anyway.

💌 I'm keeping it so real with you right now. I started writing these letters because I was afraid of what would happen to what was left of me if I didn't give myself an outlet.

I built a business and loved it more than I loved myself and I fell apart doing it. The business was strong, full of potential, but the market conditions and this political landscape were too complex for us to navigate and so we sold. And at the same time my personal life was falling apart and so was my health. I looked around and realized I had become so good at performing survival, so good at making myself useful and needed and indispensable, that I had completely lost the thread of who I was underneath all of it.

So I began writing. Not because I was ready, because I was more afraid of staying silent than of being seen.

I decided to be my own case study. To let myself be seen trying. To stop adding extra emojis and soft language to soften the blow of my own truth. To stop minimizing what I actually think and feel and know so that everyone around me can stay comfortable in their assumptions about who I am.

That is what this newsletter has always been about. A woman training her nervous system, decision by decision, moment by moment, to handle the unpredictable so that when the unpredictable comes and it always comes, she is not crawling back into the cave. She is standing in the open field, present and unfinished, letting herself be seen anyway.

🌕 This week's Full Moon in Libra is about balance and reciprocity. About the dance between self and other, between what you've been protecting and what you're ready to release into the world. Between the cave and the open field. It marks the end of Q1 and it is asking a very specific question.

What did Q1 illuminate for you?

For me it illuminated that I have a very big and giving heart and sometimes I want to jump in and fix what is not mine to fix. That I must protect my wellbeing. That every time I hold a boundary, every time I choose myself, every time I let myself be seen even imperfectly, I develop more courage for the next moment.

The nervous system can only evolve as much as you train it.

And trying, showing up, doing the thing before you feel ready, letting yourself be seen in progress, trying is the passport. Not to perfection. To winning. To the version of your life where the thing you've been incubating finally gets to fly.

Millions of years from now when stories are told about us, will we be a footnote or will we have a series?

I know what I'm choosing. And I think you do too.

What are you ready to be seen for? Even if no one is watching yet.

Reply and tell me.

Until the next letter,

Vanessa

— UPDATES + LINKS —

I'm taking next week off from the letter. Something is being built. I teased it at the bottom of Letter 14 and I'll be announcing it soon.

I'm hiring a Project Manager. If you are a PM or know one who is exceptional at bringing high-stakes events to life, reply to this email with your experience.

I'm looking for a Social Media Content Creator. Someone who can take my voice, my world, and my content and build it out consistently across platforms. I'm open to working with someone based overseas and I'd love to know if that person is already in this community. If that's you or someone you know, reply to this email and tell me what you do and who you've done it for.

I'm here when you're ready to make moves. The Table's May cohort is open, the room where we co-create in community. If you're ready to build + expand, the Sovereign Architect is for you. If you need one session to get unstuck and move, that's the Decision Sprint. Links are below.
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These letters are for women and allies who refuse to betray themselves on the way to success.

But if it is, welcome to the syndicate.