Most of Your Friends and Family Are Not Your Audience

[00:00:00] Kate: People can care about us deeply and still not see us clearly. They can remember our birthday, ask how we are and share familiar stories about who we used to be, while completely missing the person standing right in front of them. Now, often they are not responding to who we are, but to the version of us that made sense to them.

[00:00:19] Today, I want to talk about one of the most painful and also freeing truths I have ever had to learn. Most of your friends and family are not your audience.

[00:00:39] Often they are not responding to who we are, but to the version of us that made sense to them. This may look like someone who fit the family system or the friend group while playing a certain role. We learned to play before we even knew it was a role. We are most likely a person who knew how to keep the peace, absorb the tension, soften the truth, or explain ourselves in a way that made everyone else more comfortable.

[00:01:04] It can feel devastating to realize that the people who have known us the longest are not always the people most capable of recognizing our growth. It's hard to be spoken to as if we are still the person we were in 2009. I think it's so painful because we expect proximity to come with recognition.

[00:01:23] And it's not only that we don't feel the cheerleading from old friends or family members, it's that they don't seem to be able to relate to the current version of us. They're relating to who we were ten, 20, 30 years ago. So it's putting us in a box, if you will, or responding to us as like some role that they expected us to play. And also we're human, we not only expect, but it comes with the territory that our family supports us. Our high school friends who've known us forever support our work projects. We support all their decisions to get married and have children. What about us?

[00:01:59] Our confidence may be interpreted as arrogance because they remember the years when we apologized for simply existing. Our standards may be mistaken for distance because they felt safer when we were easier to access. Our ambition may be dismissed as delusion because our vision requires a category they do not have, and taking it seriously would require them to update the story they have been telling themselves about us for years.

[00:02:26] A truth I keep returning to is that love does not always come with recognition. That may sound harsh until you have lived it. Then it can be merciful because it finally gives language to the unsettling ache of being cared about and unseen at the same time.

[00:02:45] What a great opportunity to get really clear on who is your friend, who isn't, and that not every relative or every person with your same blood needs to be in your life for your whole life. I think it's just so good to go after what you want and put yourself out there because it clears the plate and the slate, if you will, and you need to clear those people out, because when all your abundance and success comes in, you want it to be yours and share it with people who were there for you when nobody believed in you. And so this is just another good reason to, you know, clear people out and do it with love. But not everybody is meant to continue on our journey with us.

[00:03:23] Think of the energy we spend on why don't these people support us. They didn't like my video? Can you believe that they didn't invite me to the thing, or they're talking about me behind my back. It takes so much energy to care what people who don't care about us think. Can you imagine if you got rid of all of that, and all of that energy that is like literally sucking the life force out of you, you put that life force into your book, into your podcast, into your business, into your new clothing line. Whatever you're creating. Oh my gosh. I think we would all be wildly successful right now.

[00:03:58] Some people may love us as sons and daughters, friends, siblings, partners or familiar figures inside an old role while remaining unable to recognize the artist, writer, speaker, leader, or person who built something meaningful from the raw material of their own life. They may care whether we are safe, functioning, polite, still reachable, or orbiting the old system in a recognizable way while having no real capacity to understand what we are building.

[00:04:27] Oh, and there is a grief in that. It's so wild that we need permission to feel grief. Because I think so many of us are gaslit our whole lives that when people aren't supporting us or they're judging us, there's something wrong with us, or we're doing something wrong, or we shouldn't care. And so just taking a moment right now to pause and acknowledge the grief that your own mother may not ever even acknowledge your book, your father may not acknowledge your PhD, your brother may not even acknowledge anything. Your best friend from high school, who you went to her wedding, her first wedding, her second wedding, all her baby showers, won't even acknowledge your podcast. There's grief in that. It doesn't make them bad people. It just makes you human with feelings that deserve to be honored.

[00:05:24] I know what it is to have strangers on the internet respond to my work with more tenderness than people who have known me for decades. I've had someone I have never met leave a comment that seems to reach directly into the soul of what I'm trying to say, while people close to me barely acknowledge some of the most meaningful work of my life. At first, the contrast can feel absurd. Eventually, though, if we let it, it becomes clarifying.

[00:05:54] It's become clear to me that recognition is not determined by proximity. A stranger is more likely to see us clearly because they're not carrying the old story. They're not filtering us through childhood family dynamics, old insecurities, hometown projections, competition, resentment, jealousy, or the version of us they preferred because it asked so much less of them. They are meeting the work without needing it to confirm who they already decided we were.

[00:06:25] That is why a comment from a stranger can sometimes feel more intimate than praise from someone close to us, because we're not only being complimented, we're being encountered. Praise says good job. Recognition says, I see what this cost you. I see the truth inside this. I see the discipline, the depth, the devotion.

[00:06:50] Recognition feels like relief in the body. It feels like you've been walking through the Sahara desert for days without any water, and then you finally get that clean, cool, crisp drink of water. It feels like contact. It feels like you're able to exhale after being under water by yourself for so long. It's not ego, it's just someone seeing the cost. It's someone acknowledging this isn't just content or output. I see what you've put into that. And, you know, I'm getting all fired up about it because there's something so simple but so healing, and so just beautiful, about someone saying, wow, I can see how much you put into this. Brava.

[00:07:32] This is what makes certain silences so painful. The 320-page book I poured my heart and hard-earned wisdom into is not just a product. The TED Talk, inspired by two loved ones who tragically died by suicide, that I wrote, rehearsed and delivered on stage, it's not just a video. My body of work, shaped by heartbreak, discipline, humiliation, risk, rejection and lived experience, it's not just content.

[00:08:05] This is private labor. They represent the years no one saw, the dedication no one celebrated, the revisions no one cared about, and the invisible work of becoming someone who can finally say what is true boldly.

[00:08:23] When people close to us barely acknowledge those moments, the pain is a very human grief that asks: How can you love me and not see this? How can you claim we are close and fail to recognize one of the truest things about me?

[00:08:40] The grief is deeper than not being cheered for. It's the pain of realizing that some people only know the version of us they needed us to be. They may know facts about our life, but they don't know the frequency of who we have become. They may know our history, but they don't recognize our essence. Some people are close to our history and far from our essence.

[00:09:04] So this is Emily. She's a paid subscriber on my Substack. Hi, Emily. Thank you for your support. She said: "This articulated something I think many of us are feeling, but rarely know how to name: the difference between being known historically and being seen presently." She gets it. "My family still relates to me like I'm a child and seems to have no desire to know the woman I am today. It's hard. Your words helped a lot. I need to read this again a few times. A deeply resonant piece."

[00:09:33] Thanks, Emily. This is why I keep going and doing this work. Because everyone's so distracted and dealing with so much, even culturally now, that I think giving people permission, giving them the language and giving them just a break to feel is really transformative.

[00:09:53] Not everyone close to us has the capacity to witness us accurately. Not everyone who loves us has the range to understand our depth, ambition, sensitivity, or the magnitude of what is unfolding in our life. Some people can only meet us through the limits of their own emotional development. That does not make them bad people, but it also does not make them our audience.

[00:10:19] This is the part that can feel brutal until it becomes freeing. Most of your friends and family are not your audience. It does not mean they don't love you. It means love and recognition are not the same thing. Some people can love the role we played in their life while remaining unable to recognize the person we became outside of it.

[00:10:38] There's sadness, but there's also relief in accepting that. Once we stop trying to be recognized by people committed to an older version of us, we can begin giving our energy to the places where our life is actually being met. We can stop bringing our future to people who are only fluent in our past, and mistaking familiarity for intimacy and politeness for support.

[00:11:02] Some people walked with us through a version of life that no longer fits the person we have become. Part of the grief is realizing they never really met us in the life we fought so hard to build. At some point, we have to stop shrinking the new life so it becomes more digestible to people who have no interest in seeing beyond the old version of us they already decided was true.

[00:11:26] Old friends and familiar relatives may keep their old stories. Meanwhile, our work gets to reach the people who can actually recognize, appreciate, and even celebrate it.

[00:11:36] Most of your friends and family are not your audience. That doesn't mean the love was meaningless, nor does it mean we are above the grief of not being fully seen by people who mattered deeply to us. Love does not always come with recognition. And maybe part of freedom is no longer confusing the two.