Interior Alchemy by Natalie Kirkpatrick

I Used My Wideness to Stay Unseen

There's a kind of wideness I used to mistake for freedom. 

The ability to hold it all.
To move between identities, instincts, and roles like changing costumes backstage.
To feel everything in the room, and still know how to smile.
To speak five emotional languages in one conversation without asking anyone to meet me in my native tongue.

I didn't know it then, but my wideness wasn't about expansiveness.  It was about protection.

It was the shape I learned to take so I wouldn't be held too tightly.
So I shouldn't be asked to choose.
So I wouldn't be betrayed by specificity.

Because naming a need meant it could be unmet.
Claiming a truth meant it could be denied.
Standing still meant I could be seen—and then judged.

So I stayed moving.
Fluid. Expansive. Unlocked.

People said I was wise, intuitive, open.
But I wasn't open.
I was strategically unpinned.

I learned to be broad so no one could aim.

And it worked.
Sort of.

I was loved in fragments.
Wanted in pieces.
Praised for my insight,
but rarely met in my ache.

I became someone people consulted, not someone they held.

And wideness made that easy.
You don't have to witness the woman if you're mesmerized by her range.

But lately—
my body is whispering a new kind of clarity.

It's not asking me to shrink.
It's asking me to root.

To stop scanning and start settling.
To stop interpreting everyone else's signal and amplify my own.

I don't want to be vast if it costs me my voice.
I don't want to be generous if it costs me my name.
I don't want to be everything—
if that means being nothing that's truly mine.

There's a sacredness in narrowing now.
Not as a limit, but as a landing.

The wideness gave me survival.
But the edges?
They're giving me selfhood.

And that...
is where I want to live.

There's a grief that comes when your strategy works—
but keeps you out of your life.

It's easy to think you're being seen when you're being praised.
When people marvel at your range, your brilliance, your depth.

But I've learned there's a difference between being witnessed and being watched.
Between being impressive and being met.

My wideness—this beautiful, clever, chameleonic wideness—wasn't just a trait.
It was a shield.
A strategy.

It let me be in every room.
without fully ever arriving.

I could speak to anything,
because I hadn't committed to the one thing
that might actually cost me—
myself.

And I almost did.

I almost edited my fire into something warm and gentle and beige.
I almost asked my words to play nice.
I almost unrooted myself again—just to be received.

But I'm not here to be digested.
I'm here to be lived with.

I want to be clear, not palatable.
I want to be specific, not safe.
I want my work to touch your cells, not your expectations.

So here I am.

Learning to narrow,
not because I've lost my range—
but because I've finally chosen my root.

The wideness was never the problem.
The hiding was.

And now?
I'm letting myself be seen.
Not as the one who holds everything.
But as the one who belongs to something real.

Even if it costs me your comfort.
Even if it costs me praise.

Even if it costs me the illusion that love only 
lives
where I'm the one doing the accommodating.