Imaginary Haters

On the invisible audience, the fear of being seen, and what happened when I showed up anyway.

I have carried an imaginary audience for most of my life.

Not real people with real opinions about real things I had actually done. Something vaguer and more persistent than that. A shapeless crowd of observers I could never quite locate or name, but whose imagined judgment had an outsized influence on what I allowed myself to do, say, try, become. I made decisions based on what they might think. I stayed small in certain rooms to avoid their notice. I held back from things I wanted because the risk of failing in front of them felt worse than the certainty of never trying at all.

For a long time I didn’t have a name for this. It was just the water I swam in. The low hum underneath everything.

I think it started in middle school, the way most things that haunt us do. You are thirteen and your identity is barely formed, your prefrontal cortex is still years from completion, and everything feels unbearably high stakes because in some ways it actually is. You are deciding, in real time, who you are going to be, what you stand for, how you want to show up in the world. And that process is so raw and so tender that even the smallest outside noise can knock you off course. I was trying to become someone and I was terrified of anyone watching me do it.

My parents banned me from social media when I was growing up. At the time I accepted it with the resignation of a teenager who has no choice. But looking back I was also, quietly, relieved. Social media would have given the imaginary haters an address. A place to find me, to comment on the life I was still in the middle of figuring out, to weigh in on a version of myself that wasn’t finished yet. Not having it meant I got to develop who I was without outside input from people whose opinions I hadn’t earned the right to care about yet. I got to become someone in private. That turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of my adolescence, even if it didn’t feel like a gift at the time.

But the imaginary haters didn’t disappear when I grew up. They just changed shape.

When I left my engineering career and started building Pooterie, they reappeared in a new form. Boston is not a city that is short on highly successful people. Pretty much everyone I encountered was on some rung of the corporate ladder, working toward the next one, fluent in the language of titles and promotions and five year plans. And I was a ceramicist working out of a shared community studio with three hundred other artists, not yet able to afford my own space, making maybe a hundred pieces a month and not selling all of them. I was terrified of what it would look like to show up in those rooms as that person.

I didn’t want to be seen as the floundering, failing, starving artist. I didn’t want people to patronize me or feel bad for me or make themselves small in the conversation to accommodate what they assumed was my fragility. I wanted to take up the same space they did. I wanted to feel like I deserved to be in the room on equal footing, not as someone’s charity case or cautionary tale. And most of this, I now understand, was entirely in my head. The people in those rooms were not thinking about me the way I imagined. They had their own imaginary audiences to manage.

But that understanding came slowly, and it came through showing up rather than through thinking my way to it.

I had zero personal social media before I started posting about Pooterie. I dragged my feet for over a year to even set up the account, and the reason was exactly what you’d expect: I didn’t want people to see my life and judge how it was panning out. I didn’t want to give the imaginary audience a window. I had spent so many years keeping that window closed and I wasn’t sure I was ready to open it.

But here is what I kept coming back to. The reason I was censoring myself wasn’t because I believed what I was doing was wrong or small or not worth sharing. It was because of people who weren’t even watching. And at some point I had to ask myself a serious question: is failing myself actually better than failing them? Is staying invisible to protect an imaginary audience worth the cost of never finding out what I’m capable of?

The answer was no. It was clearly, obviously, uncomplicatedly no. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.

So I started posting. Honestly, without a strategy and without knowing if anyone would care. Every post was a small act of saying: this is me, this is what I believe, this is what I’m building. And something unexpected happened. The gap between who I wanted to be and who I was actually becoming started to close. Not because anyone validated me, though people did, overwhelmingly, in ways I hadn’t anticipated. But because showing up honestly every day, even on the hard days, even when I was still grieving the old life or teetering on the edge of doubt, made me more certain of myself. Confidence, it turns out, is not something you think your way into. It’s something you build by doing the thing you’re afraid to do, repeatedly, until the fear gets quieter than the conviction.

The real haters did eventually show up. They always do when you grow fast enough to be visible. I was bracing and ready for this but what I didn’t expect was that they helped me. Not because their criticism was useful, it mostly wasn’t, but because of what it clarified. The people trying hardest to rattle you are almost always the ones who never gave themselves permission to try. Their noise is not about you. It is about the version of themselves that chose safety over the thing they actually wanted, and the discomfort of watching someone else choose differently. Once you see that clearly, the noise stops landing the way it used to.

I think about this when I notice how many people follow along not because they want to make ceramics or leave their jobs, but because of that feeling of what if. I get it from so many people, in comments and DMs and conversations at events. The what if is universal. It lives in everyone, regardless of where they are in life, regardless of how much they love their work or their team or their life. Because we are not built to want exactly what was handed to us. We are built to wonder. To imagine. To ask what else might be possible.

The imaginary haters were, in a strange way, protecting that wondering. Keeping it small and safe and private where no one could touch it. What I had to learn, slowly and imperfectly, is that the wondering doesn’t come true in private. It only comes true when you let it out into the world and find out what it’s made of.

The imaginary haters are still there sometimes. I don’t think they ever fully leave. But they are quieter now than they have ever been. And I am louder. And that gap keeps closing every single day that I choose to show up anyway.