The first time I went to sesshin, the 7-day silent retreat at a Zen monastery in the Catskill mountains, I wasn’t troubled by the long days of meditation, the early morning wake-ups, nor by back pain or silent manual labor out in the sun. I definitely wasn’t troubled by the fact that we weren’t supposed to speak to each other, weren’t even supposed to make eye contact.

In fact, I was profoundly relieved.

“No one’s looking at me,” I said to my teacher, in our brief daily face-to-face encounter for instruction.

I was twenty-two years old, newly out as trans, and profoundly self-conscious about everything.

In many ways, I was made to be self-conscious of everything then, as a survival mechanism. In every encounter with a stranger, I had to quickly assess whether they saw me as a woman or a man, then lean into whichever I guessed. I had to smoothly accept and gloss over awkward apologies about strangers’ “mistakes” about my gender, even when they corrected themselves in the wrong direction.

And then of course there was the separate layer of growing up existing as female within rape culture, and the hyperconsciousness that that trained into me. Who is speaking to me? Why? Who is looking at me? Why? Am I safe?

And then there were the mundane things for me to be self-conscious about on this retreat. I didn’t like brushing my retainer in the shared bathroom. I had a sunburn. My hair was sticking up funny. My shirt was all wrong.

But here, on this silent retreat, no one could say anything to me for an entire week.

For the first time in my life, I felt like other people’s thoughts and perceptions about me were not my problem.

That my public existence was not an equation to be solved to other people’s liking.

In school, I was the type of smart kid who almost never raised their hand. It drove my teachers crazy. They knew I was smart. Why wouldn’t I “contribute” in class? What a shame to have to take points off my “participation” grade.

But I didn’t feel like I had anything to say in class. I didn’t feel strongly enough about whatever I thought to want to share it, and besides, by the time I had formulated an idea, the class had usually moved on to something else.

The issue even persisted in my ability to take notes and process texts. “Dialogue with the text!” they told us, in my liberal arts college education. We were handed photocopies of dense texts and told to underline in colored pen and write notes in the margin. Not summary notes! Don’t paraphrase! Dialogue with the text!

One day, I duly worked through a text, underlining and starring key passages, but didn’t write anything in the margins. I didn’t feel I had anything to say in dialogue with the text either. I felt I had nothing to add, nothing to “contribute.” The teacher came around that day and checked our notes. I didn’t get credit for doing the reading.

Imagine, not having anything to say even in response to a text, even in the privacy of one’s own room.

Imagine, not knowing one could exist around other people without feeling in some way like an apology, without curling reflexively into a defensive posture.

Now, I believe I need to learn to exist in public. I need to share my ideas in public. I’ve thought about what I want for my life, which includes sharing my writing, sharing my thoughts, having a public profile as a speaker and trainer, leading programs and organizations—and I have to show up in public in a different way.

(Oddly, I’ve never minded public speaking. It’s always felt like an act, and one I happen to be good at.)

But I hate existing online. I hate social media. I hate even checking my email.

But what’s the alternative? One could shout into the void, and choose not to be in relationship around whatever one says.

One could sneak away to a cave or mountaintop somewhere (and this is something I’ve considered), or take on only the types of professional work that require little to no public presence.

I’ve thought about these options, and I still want what I want professionally. So I need to learn to exist in public, online, in a way that works for me.

It’s helpful to see why this might be challenging. Three decades and counting of feeling like it’s not safe to show up, of training myself to think I had nothing to say—even when I did—because I didn’t even know how to take up the space to share an idea.

Recognizing this helps me be patient with myself.

It helps calm my impulse to plunge in too fast, it helps me understand that the pendulum might swing one way and then another, and that this is a normal part of the process. It helps me commit to challenges of showing up in public as a learning process, as an experiment. It helps me avoid the binary thinking that if I can’t do this entirely to my liking the first time, I’ll never be any good at it and never achieve my goals.

Little experiments, little steps outside the comfort zone. They provide data and chart a new course over time.

Accepting the pendulum swings—today I feel big and brave, tomorrow I might want to run and hide.

Learning I don’t need to be perfect to put something out there.

Living into the knowledge that my existence is not an equation to be solved to other people’s liking.