The Gift of Being Seen
Note: This Women’s Day, I feature a guest post from my dear friend and fellow writer, Suma Nagaraj, who writes about the gift of friendship that she and I share.
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Some friendships are loud, the kind that announce themselves so that everyone else bears witness. Yet others arrive with soft footsteps, slipping into the spaces between your silences like morning light through diaphanous curtains. Is it the light that lingers, or the fact that it arrives not with fanfare but muted and gentle, warming you while not asking for an audience? You don’t really know. You just bask in it.
The kind that doesn’t require you to be anything other than what you already are.
My friendship with Natalie is of the latter kind.
We are both of the writerly persuasion, though our craft leans towards different genres. Where her advocacy and activism blaze trails in equality and social justice, and her memoir etches the tender architecture of identity and belonging, I find refuge in made-up worlds, where invented characters carry truths far too fragile for the all-seeing light of non-fiction. What she writes about tends to the real, breathing, agitating world, while what I write about tends to the imaginary, the plotted, the carefully constructed, contours of which the obsessive-compulsive in me can control. But outside of our chosen craft corners, there beats a shared pulse: the acknowledgement that words are not just tools to make sense of this world, but sanctuaries, lifelines cast across the chasms of diverse human experience.
What drew us to each other? Introversion, primarily. But also, an acknowledgement, almost cellular, of kindred spirits navigating a loud world that often mistakes quietness for absence, contemplation for disconnection, silence for unaffectedness. In Natalie, I found someone who understood that the introverted life is not about shyness or social anxiety, how it is usually described, but about how we process the sometimes-needless cacophony of the world. We who retreat to refill, who seek solitude the way others seek companionship, who find in books and blank pages a kind of divine communion that gatherings of people can never provide.
There's this peculiar alchemy that happens when two writers become friends. It’s something elemental – a mutual witnessing of the creative struggle, an understanding of the chosen isolation that is characteristic of the writing life. Because for all that, the act of writing itself is a stubbornly solitary act, in which there lies an aching need to be understood by someone who knows what it means to excavate your interior landscape and lay it bare on the page, who comprehends the terror and exhilaration of that exposure.
There's a particular kind of loneliness that writers know only too intimately: the knowledge that even our most honest, most vulnerable work might not reach the readers who need it, that the hours spent alone with our thoughts might result in nothing more than deleted drafts and abandoned projects. But having another writer as a friend eases that loneliness, not by eliminating it, but by sharing its weight. We remind each other why we do this work, why we return to the page time and again despite the difficulty, the crippling doubt, the terror of the blank page torment and inspiration in equal measure.
And yet, the page is what helps us communicate with the world in a way that the spoken word really cannot. The written word has given us both so much: a vocation, a means of self-expression, a way to make meaning from the raw material of experience.
In Natalie, I've found someone who understands because she's been there too, wrestling her truth onto the page while navigating the additional complexity of writing about identity, of bearing witness to experiences that demand to be told, yet exact a deeply exhausting emotional cost in the telling itself. If you haven’t read her searing memoir, Black Girl, White Skin, it’s the first thing you should do after this.
We owe our gratitude to Andrea Canaan, a friend we have in common who lays down the soil for kinship in everything she does at A Writer’s Life. In conversations that spiralled from craft to philosophy to the mundane details of daily life over many cups of coffee, Natalie and I discovered an almost “meant-to-be” kind of friendship, the kind that sees and acknowledges the other quietly. For introverts, there is no cleaner air that we can breathe: of being seen as we are, stripped of all performativity, to be unabashedly witnessed in all our complexities, in the chiaroscuro duality of our light and our shadow, an invisible wine glass being raised in our direction by the other that only we can see and clink our invisible glasses against.
This is what true artistic kinship looks like: not competition or comparison, but a gentle tending of each other's creative fires. Being introverts, our friendship doesn't require constant contact or frequent meetups. We live an ocean apart, but the presence is felt and appreciated despite the distance. It exists in a quieter register, sustained by mutual respect and genuine affection, even when time zones separate us.
This is what Natalie offers me: a friendship where I don't have to diminish my introversion or amplify my extroversion, where I can be exactly who I am.
In turn, I hope I offer her the same. A space where her multifaceted identity – writer, activist, advocate, teacher – can exist without hierarchy, where her quieter moments are valued as much as her public ones, where her need for solitude is understood as replenishment rather than withdrawal.
Our lifelong affair with the written word and travel binds us in ways that transcend geography and circumstance. In each other, we've found fellow travellers on this path, people who understand that writing is not just what we do, but who we intrinsically are.
This is what friendship between artists looks like at its best, and I say this with the appropriate hubris that comes from a lifetime of being a wallflower: a mutual elevation, a reciprocal inspiration. We don't diminish ourselves to make room for each other; instead, we expand, our separate creative visions existing side by side, sometimes intersecting, sometimes diverging, but always acknowledging and honouring each other's right to create exactly what we need to create.
In Natalie, I have found a friend who understands the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from existing in a world not built for introverts, who knows the restorative power of solitude, who values depth over breadth in relationships. I have found a fellow word-lover who treats language with the reverence it deserves, who knows that the right word in the right place at the right time can change everything for someone who struggles with words. By choice.
And in our kinship, sustained by words written and unwritten, shared and held close, I have found proof that the best friendships don't ask us to be more than we are. They ask only that we show up honestly, that we witness each other with compassion, that we tend to the delicate work of understanding and being understood, that in laying bare our souls through our chosen mode of communication, we are witnessed as we are, for who we are.
Because for a writer, being seen this way, being comprehended, being embraced without a single word being said sometimes… is everything.
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Suma Nagaraj is a writer and editor based in Bangalore, India. Her work explores the quiet corners of human experience, the spaces between what is said and what remains unspoken. She believes in the power of stories to illuminate our common humanity while honoring our beautiful differences. You can find more about her on https://sumanagaraj.com
