On Being Known

The challenges of exposure

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Since writing On Getting Out of Bed I’ve been acutely aware of the risks of over-exposing myself online and in public in general. There are risks involved in being known by others, especially when you allow them to see the less pleasant and functional parts of you. When

Susannah Black Roberts

asked me to write about my experience with OCD for Plough in 2023, I made a very careful, prayerful calculated decision to reveal something about myself to the world that I knew would alter the way I was perceived by some people. I sought counsel from my closest friends, and ultimately decided that the benefit of sharing my suffering and thereby comforting others in Christ outweighed the harm of being exposed as someone with a mental disorder. I stand by that decision, but I’ll never know how I altered people’s view of me.

And this is the risk of being known, of sharing your story with someone. Once exposed, there’s no getting it back into the bottle. Their perception of you is forever altered. It can be adapted, modified, evolved, but it will never go back to the way it was before the disclosure, whatever that disclosure was. Is it any surprise that people are choosing rather to disclose themselves to AI companions? To be human is to live in community, and to live in community requires you to disclose yourself, and disclosure requires risk, and risk requires courage and prudence. For not all disclosure is appropriate. Not all risks are worth taking. And not all fearlessness is courageous. And yet we long to be known and loved anyway. This is the basic human condition, to desire to be known completely and loved despite our flaws and sins. Only God can meet that fundamental need. But humans play a role in this. God uses us to communicate his love to one another. So, I believe, human affirmation in response to disclosure is necessary and good. But how do we deal with the reality that not all people will respond to our stories with affirmation? How do we live with the fact that some people will respond to our self-disclosure with dismissal or condemnation? How do we accept that being known doesn’t always mean being affirmed?