On editing ourselves and what we hide.
For the past six years, there has been a woman living under my bed. She’s a self-portrait—a version of me I painted more than thirty years ago when I was coming out of a bad marriage and trying to figure out who I was again.
I had three young children and was living in a little old yellow house with an azalea-lined dirt driveway. Times were tough. And after years of not picking up a brush, I had started painting again. One of the first things I painted was myself in an attempt to find out who I was.
The painting changed a lot over the weeks I worked on it. There are layers and layers underneath what you see now. It began as a partial nude. At some point, I painted the sheer white blouse over her. I don’t remember exactly what was going through my mind when I did that. I wish I did. Looking at her now, I wonder why I added the blouse. Was I covering myself up even then? I think so.
Decades later, when I was preparing my house for sale, a design consultant took one look at the painting hanging in my bedroom and told me to put “that thing” under my bed. So, of course, I obliged. You’re supposed to depersonalize a house when you’re selling it. Buyers need to imagine themselves living there, not wonder about the partially naked woman hanging on the bedroom wall.
Eventually the house came off the market, but the painting stayed under the bed.
I’ve been thinking about that. At the time, putting the painting under the bed made sense. I never thought about bringing it back out once the reason for hiding it was gone.
We learn what parts of us work well in a particular job or relationship. We figure out what people respond to and what makes them uncomfortable. We learn what gets approval and what might be better kept to ourselves. After a while, I think we can forget we’re even doing it.
Over time, we can start mistaking the edited version for our whole self.
That’s one of the reasons I have a complicated relationship with the way we talk about personal branding. Too often, the conversation starts with presentation. What should I post? What should my website say? How should I look? What do I want to be known for?
All good questions, just not the first questions to ask. First, know who you are before you start worrying about how to present it.
That’s where brand development starts.
My work as a brand strategist has always started there. Before anyone starts talking about logos, websites or campaigns, I want to understand what is already true about a business. What makes it different? Why would somebody choose it? What is there that we don’t want to lose when we start deciding how the outside world should see it?
Personal brand works the same way. I think you have to spend some time figuring out what is really there before you start deciding how you want other people to see it.
A personal brand doesn’t require telling strangers your private history or turning every difficult thing you’ve lived through into content. You’re allowed to have boundaries. Some things can simply belong to you.
But I do think there is a difference between privacy and hiding. Privacy is one thing. Editing yourself because some part of you feels like it should remain hidden or would be hard to explain is something else.
There’s a difference between deciding something is yours to keep and deciding that some part of who you are needs to be edited out because it doesn’t fit the version of yourself you’ve become comfortable showing everyone else.
You don’t have to reveal everything to stop hiding who you are.
That’s probably why this painting is hitting me differently now. Long before I became a brand strategist, I was an artist. Art school taught me to keep looking, especially when I thought I already knew what I was looking at.
Years later, I built a career doing much the same thing with businesses.
For a long time, I treated those as two different parts of my life. There was the artist and there was the strategist. I see now that being an artist probably had a lot to do with the kind of brand strategist I became.
Which makes it ironic that one of the most literal pieces of evidence that I am an artist has been shoved under my bed for six years.
Thirty-something years ago, I was painting that woman while trying to figure out who she was. I know her better now. She had another child, raised four of them and built a business. A lot happened that the woman in that painting could never have imagined. Somewhere along the way, though, the artist part of me moved farther to the side than I realized.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my work thinking about how people and businesses want to be seen. Maybe that’s why this feels so obvious now. Every now and then, it’s probably worth asking what part of yourself you put away somewhere along the way. Mine has been waiting under my bed for six years. I don’t think she belongs there anymore.
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