firstly, let me share that I'm a leo rising (1st house ofc) and leo sun in my 12th house. I still don't really know what that means (astro folks, pls DM me with wisdom). but I do know that it reflects my complex relationship with performance, self-expression, audience, and attention.
I love attention and I hate being perceived.
as a toddler, I always gave dance performances for my parents and their friends at dinners. growing up as a youth, I would spend two hours in the washroom every day, going over my own dance routines before my shower.
I enjoy and am skilled at performance. and I still struggle with differentiating between performance for external purpose and that of authentic expression, and the greyness of that in-between. the external purpose has previously largely been about validation, and it has become more complicated as I've grown more confident. the external purpose now also includes my contributions to the world of storytelling, envisioning, and educating. the drive for contributing is rooted in both liberatory purpose and a weighted sense of responsibility as a member of the collective.
the other day, through a conversation with a mentor, I realized that my relationships with visibility, performance, and responsibility are also significantly shaped by my previous experiences of navigating my healing in public as a young adult (IYKYK). it was a really valuable and transformational experience to be able to share my lived experiences of mental illness as an immigrant Asian daughter and student and to advocate for systemic change for student mental health. it was also a really intense and jarring experience to be constantly perceived (and sometimes policed) in my healing by many strangers. looking back, I wish that the confused and disoriented 19-year old knew that she could've chosen healing in private over responsibility in public advocacy while navigating some of the hardest years of their life.
I love attention and I hate being perceived.
I don't believe in the sentiment of "I don't care what others think." I believe that we are relational beings who rely on one another, and thus, our perceptions and experiences of one another. we want to be seen, heard, witnessed, and understood, in relationship. so I orient myself to keep in mind - whose opinions of me do I care about? how do I want to experience myself in this lifetime and how do I want to be perceived by these people? I want cohesiveness between who I want to be in the world (and what I need to embody in order to experience myself in this particular way) and how I am perceived by the people with whom I seek relationship.
the challenge of writing publicly is that I don't entirely get to choose my audience, and thus, with whom I am in relationship (how do we differentiate between relationships that involve mutual vs. one-sided perception? the risks of pedestalization and celebritization need to be named here too). this can easily lead to me feeling perceived (and surveilled), and thus, performing from a place of who/what I think I should be/do.
my automatic leo sun in 12th house energy is to turn everything that I do into a performance, even when I don't really want to. usually driven by a desire to be visible and as an extension of that, to use visibility to share transformative and political ideas and practices. and when I became a therapist, I decided (as in, the industry makes one believe) that a therapist should be only talking about serious therapy topics on social media, that they shouldn't be posting selfies or sex jokes or photos of their meals. especially a politicized femme of colour therapist.
so I divided myself up (literally through two ig accounts, one public and one private) between what a politicized therapist "should" look like vs. all of the unfiltered things that a person "shouldn't" be sharing online if they are a mental health practitioner. the people on my public account see my politics, yes. but they don't get to see that beyond (and definitely through) my politics, I am a radiant being of joy. I am a pleasure-seeker. I take a lot of selfies. I have great legs. I love to eat and moan. I've been exploring queerness and community-oriented polyamory. I'm shifting my relationship with Asianness and Coreanness on the daily. and thus I am both celebrating and grieving daily. I'm a multi-layered being, which will never be fully encapsulated in the English language but it's also definitely more than what I have shared through my public performance thus far.
after doing this very explicit fragmenting and filtering of self for a few years, I am getting tired. I want to explore the practice of integration. the practice of sharing without over-filtering or hyper-performance. what might it be like to write as if I don't have an audience? or as if I am my main audience? while recognizing that I am being perceived at the same time. how might that change how I experience myself? how I relate to others? how I relate to visibility and performance?
I'm holding my breath right now. so I remind myself to breathe. deep breath.
I love attention and I hate being perceived.
let's see what might shift through this writing practice.