Seen regardless 🌸
Dear Reader,
It’s been a while, huh?
Life was ripping me a new one. 😂 I was in the downward phase of my 2026 chapter, and let’s just say we’re all glad to be rising into the upper phase. 😭😂
I wasn’t actually sure this one would ever make it out of my drafts.
Anyway,
I’ve been afraid to be seen — for as long as I can remember. Not just visible, but known: my messy edges, the parts that don’t fit the tidy story we were sold.Maybe it came from a setting where being human wasn’t always allowed; maybe it was the systems that shaped me. Either way, somewhere along the way I learned to hide.
It could also be because our first instinct is to perceive and judge. Yet we all experience the imperfect, the uncertain, and the “everything is okay” performances that come with being human. We judge the clearly overwhelmed mother chasing after her kids in the store or the unemployed friend who can’t seem to lock down a job, despite each of us having been some version of them at some point.
How quickly we forget.
I started writing this note after posting my last musing and feeling exposed.
Exposed that I wasn’t as put together as I’d like. Exposed that what my outward self portrayed and what my inward self felt were contradicting each other. Exposed that I might be judged or pitied. Exposed that people might ask questions — and answer those same questions themselves — questions I never needed raised in the first place.
And yet, here I am doing it all over again.
A friend of mine recently told me she’s about to make her own rules because the ones we have now aren’t working for her. 😂
I felt that.
So I’m making up my own rules too.
I choose to be fully myself despite everything in me wanting to retreat. Because while I may cringe at first, that one “this is so relatable” message always reminds me why I do it.
I realized a long time ago that the old rules never really worked for me.
So tunaanza upya. 😂
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Some might say it’s a strange choice — to force myself to accept being seen in all the ways that I am. To judge myself less for being a loud and willing participant in the human experience. To allow myself to be as emotionally present as I truly desire. To resist falling into the stereotypes our world often praises: the stoic, detached, nonchalant versions of ourselves.
To allow myself to fall apart, piece myself back together, and regain my vibrance again and again.
Maybe this is the burden I bear for choosing to give my thoughts a voice, for choosing to create something.
They say the best creations are authentic.
The kind that relate to people.
Maybe that’s why I do it.
I lay myself bare so you don’t have to.
I show that sometimes I’m not okay — and that that’s okay. I show that my bad days are still part of my good life. And while I rebuild and find my way back to my whimsical joy, I show that too.
Maybe I’m here to remind you that you’re not alone.
Cue “High School Musical’s We’re All in This Together.” 😌
Life is weird.
Life is messy.
Life will have you wide awake in the dead of night trying to figure things out or crying at 3 a.m., your heart physically aching. And then, that same life will put you back together so beautifully that you’ll forget the pain ever existed and wonder why you stressed at all.
Maybe I’m meant to help you see your own humanness through mine. To allow you to revel in it. To constantly remind both you and myself that we are not alone because, boy, does it feel that way sometimes.
A lot of this experience doesn’t make sense.
Maybe it shouldn’t.
But either way, it’s an experience worth having together.
With gratitude,
🌸 Kat Kinoti 🌸
