Episode 217. Being Seen Without Being Completely Exposed
It’s been almost seven months since I sat down behind this microphone.
Not because I haven’t had anything to say. I’ve had notes, ideas, conversations that could have become episodes—and plenty of moments when I thought, I should talk about this.
But I’ve also been navigating a significant season of change and becoming, and figuring out what it means to use my voice when I don’t necessarily want to share everything I’m living through.
At my Walking Mom Home book party in September, I found myself putting words to so much of what I’ve been sitting with: trusting the unfolding, allowing ourselves to outgrow old identities, letting other people become new versions of themselves, and learning that being seen is not the same thing as being completely exposed.
So in this episode, I’m sharing the talk I gave that night—and reflecting on what it means for me now as I find my way back to the microphone.
We’re talking about the many versions of ourselves we become throughout a lifetime, the hundreds of tiny acts of courage that can happen between hiding and allowing ourselves to truly be seen, and why privacy and authenticity are not opposites.
I’m also sharing the three questions I ask myself when deciding what belongs publicly:
What am I sharing?
Why am I sharing it?
Can something I’ve lived serve someone else if I allow it to be seen?
Not everything meaningful in your life has to become content.
You’re allowed to have boundaries. You’re allowed to evolve beyond the version of you other people know. You’re allowed to share at the level at which you’re ready to be seen.
And you’re allowed to keep becoming.
In this episode:
Why I stepped away from the podcast for almost seven months
What my Walking Mom Home book party taught me about trusting the unfolding
Letting go of identities and versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown
Allowing the people we love to become, too
My own evolution from being terrified of visibility to podcasting, speaking and writing a memoir
The difference between vulnerability and complete exposure
Why privacy doesn’t make you inauthentic
Using discernment when deciding what parts of your life become public
Finding my way back to my own voice
Why I’m feeling called back to helping other people use theirs
And if using your voice through podcasting is something that’s been sitting on your heart, I’m returning to that work, too.
Podcasting with Heart is my self-paced course for the person who wants to learn how to create and launch a podcast themselves.
And I’m opening a small number of private Podcast in a Day intensives for the person who knows they want a podcast but wants support taking it from an idea to publish-ready.
Links and details are below.
A question to sit with after this episode:
What are you ready to say—and at what level are you ready to be seen now?
On Demand DIY Podcasting Course:
https://nicholejoy.kartra.com/page/podcastingwithheart
Podcasting Resources:
https://www.nicholejoy.com/bestpodcastingresources
Stay Connected on the ‘gram:
https://www.instagram.com/nichole_joy__/
Transcript:
217.
[00:00:00] It's been a while since I sat down behind this microphone. This morning when I was out walking, I realized I'm ready to go ahead and share. And I went back to my podcast thinking, "Ah, it's been, it's been a little while." And I didn't realize it's been since March. It's been seven months almost. And I've thought about coming back to the mic so many times.
Uh, I've actually had lots of ideas for things I wanna share. I've taken notes. I've had conversations where I thought, "This should be a podcast episode." And then I just didn't record them. If you're hearing sniffling in the background, by the way, that's my, my new dog There's a lot of reasons why I never sat down to record, but I think that one of them is I've been figuring out what it means to use my voice in a season of my life where I don't necessarily wanna share everything I'm living through.
Not that I ever have. I mean, ... I've always shared a lot, but never everything And so what's happened since I last spoke to you in March? I [00:01:00] completed the Motherline program in late May, early June. I published my book, Walking Mom Home. The birthday was May 5th, and then summer slammed me. And I had the book party September 3rd in Tampa.
All the while, I've been moving through a significant season of becoming, a big season of change And I've been trying to figure out - what I wanna share from within this season. See, for a while I was telling myself this story that I had to wait until everything was perfect. I had to wait until everything was complete and put together before I start talking again.
And that's not true. I still get to share. There's still a ton of stuff happening that I can share while there's a lot of, um, lingering things going on in my personal life. And ironically, I think I finally found the words for some of this thought process when I was standing in front of a room full of women [00:02:00] at my book party
. And so I wanna share with you my actual speech
You should know before I start that I had a lot of resistance to celebrating this book and having any party because of the nature of the book. As you know, the book exists in part because my mom died, and I kind of struggled. I was like, "How am I gonna celebrate this book? Like, how do you actually find joy in a heavy personal topic?"
And so what I've come to understand is that this absolutely does deserve a celebration, and it's obviously not a celebration of her passing, but of her life and of our relationship and of what became possible between us while she was here and what has continued to become possible because she was here It was seven years ago, I had a knowing that I was gonna end up writing a book, and at the time I had no idea what it would be about and I didn't know when it would be, and I had no idea how I would become somebody who wrote a [00:03:00] book, and most definitely would have never guessed it would be about this particular topic.
'Cause I mentioned in the book and at my mom's service that I, I was certain that she was gonna be the oldest, most obnoxious crazy person at the assisted living facilities. So I never thought this would be where we are. And sometimes we can see or feel something that's coming in the future for us before we have any idea of how we're gonna get there, and that in between is really, really uncomfortable.
Not just with this process. Thank you, Imani, for the visuals. Wait, let me help. So I am a Virgo rising, and I'm a one line of human design, which if you're not familiar with that, what it means is I really like structure and I like having a plan and I like having things organized, and I would have really wanted God and the universe to just hand me a plan, an itinerary, and say, "This is how you're gonna do it, this is how you're gonna get there, and these are all the steps."
But that's not how this kind of thing works, and I will say one of the greatest lessons of my life has been learning how to [00:04:00] trust the unfolding of my life, and it just can be very uncomfortable for somebody who finds a lot of security in knowing how things are gonna happen. Because now I can look back and recognize that I was in the middle of the unfolding.
I was in the boo, and I still am in many ways, and I think all of us are, and it's something that existed as only a knowing and a vision years ago is now something that I can actually hold with my hands. And many of you have witnessed my unfolding in different ways, and this is part of what makes this particular room and all of you really important to me.
So some of you have known me since I was, like, 10. And some of you, where's my sister, have known me forever. Many of you knew my mom, which means that you've all known a lot of different versions of both of us. And I've been on a really long journey, and I'm still on the journey of remembering who I really am and becoming who I am.
I've changed, I've experimented, I've gotten things wrong, I've shed identities, [00:05:00] and I've become someone new, and then I outgrow her as well. My branding people love that about me. So every time they do my branding, by the time it's done I'm like, "Well, that, that was, like, two months ago," so I'm different. It's really pricey, by the way, to do that.
It's annoying and it's pricey. So what I wanna say is you've all loved versions of me that don't exist anymore, and then when I changed, you got to know and love the next one. And not everybody does that. Sometimes people remain attached to a different version of us, and sometimes we remain attached to old versions of other people, and some of those relationships belong to particular chapters of our lives, and they just don't move forward.
But so many of you have continued to meet me as I became, and you didn't require me to remain the same version of Nicole that you originally knew in order to continue loving me. And so I don't know if I've ever properly thanked any of you for that, for continuing to meet the new versions of me. So thank you.
And the thing about my mom is she was allowed to become [00:06:00] as well, and I've had to learn to offer my mom the same grace. The Tammy who existed at the end of her life wasn't exactly the Tammy who existed ten years before that or twenty years before that, and even still in the last couple years of her life, she was very different.
She outgrew parts of herself, and she made different choices. She became new versions of Tammy, and I think part of truly loving someone is allowing them to become One of the things that my mom ultimately taught me was that a woman is allowed to choose herself. Sometimes choosing yourself means making a choice that other people may not make for you.
And sometimes it means leaving behind an identity that once fit but doesn't anymore. And I think that an important part of being alive is continuing to allow ourselves to grow and evolve and to let old identities fall away when they no longer fit. Not with the goal of becoming perfect, just with the goal of becoming- So, sorry this is getting long, but I have a lot to say.
So the fact that this book exists is evidence of my [00:07:00] evolution, and those of you who have known me for a while know that 10 years ago, I would never have been somebody who could speak into a microphone and podcast all the time, or who could make videos and material to talk on social media, to talk at the news, and to write about my personal life.
That was all a hard no for me. It's very private, and I didn't have the confidence that I do now. And when I first started sharing publicly and I started my first blog, I was talking about clothes, because clothes felt safe. And I don't say that to diminish that version of me and to pick it, but I was sharing at the level that I was ready to be seen, and it took years and a lot of work that not everybody has seen the behind the scenes of what it took to be comfortable sharing my deepest, some of my deepest stuff.
I'm gonna choose my words 'cause there's children here. To get to that point, and peeling away the layers and remembering who I am. And I wanna make one important distinction about that, and that being seen isn't the [00:08:00] same as being completely exposed. I don't think that vulnerability means that everybody gets access to everything.
I don't think we have to air all of our dirty laundry in order to be authentic. And I remember one of the people who proofread the book, she's like, "But I want more detail. Like, what exactly was it? How," you know, they want the dirt. And I was like, I get it, but you know, some of that dirt is just not necessary for the intention of the book, and the goal and the purpose of putting it out to the world and sharing the story.
It's not to air all the dirt. I know we like the dirt. It's very fascinating, and it makes it maybe a more entertaining read, but that's not... Yeah, if anything, becoming more visible has required more discernment, not less. And I've started to ask myself, what am I sharing? Why am I sharing it? And if it's something that I have lived can help somebody else, can I allow it to be seen?
With the book, these aren't just my mom and I's stories and our private moments. These are the pieces that I chose to share with intention. I didn't sit down one day and just decide, I think today's gonna be the day that I write a book. What am [00:09:00] I gonna write about? Eventually, there was something inside of me that I felt like I could not share.
And I just write a lot, and a lot of it stays in my private little journal. Hi. But then I realized this, I actually felt like I had to share, and I had to get a lot of guts to share it with the world, of course. The last thing I think I wanna ask you is when you read the book, if you read it, and if you have already, I actually don't want you to spend the entire time thinking about just me and my mom and thinking it's just about a healing relationship between a mother/daughter, because that's not really the intention.
That is the story, but it's, it's a living, breathing example of what it looks like in my life, and hopefully it activates questions within you asking who you've been in your past and who you are now, what identities you've outgrown, and where you might still be holding onto old versions of yourself.
Where might healing still be possible within yourself, with a partner, with a parent, another family member, a child? And who might you be becoming next? So [00:10:00] yes, my mom and I are the characters, the main characters in this particular story. But the point is to show you what's possible, and hopefully to open up something in you.
The last thing I wanna say is if you knew her or if you've read the book and you learned anything about her, I hope that something you can take away is finding your own little piece of Tammy. I know I rejected that for most of my life, but now that I'm a little older and a little wiser, I'm able to extract the gifts and move through my life with parts of her that I wanna carry forward.
Maybe that's something she taught you that you learned about in the book or that I've shared. Maybe something that made you laugh. Maybe it's something that gave you permission to make a different choice in your own life. She was never one to put herself second. She always chose herself, and I will take parts of that with me.
I think that when you carry a piece of somebody forward, it's not just to remember them, but it's to incorporate pieces of them into who we become. [00:11:00] And I hope that somewhere in the book and somewhere with any of the anecdotes and stories that I've shared about her, that you can take a lesson for yourself and allow yourself to choose yourself and heal.
So it was a little long for an in-person speech, but I realized I actually have a lot to say, and I haven't had an outlet for expression. Well, it's been here, but I haven't utilized this outlet for expression in so long, and I need that. I crave that. , It does a lot for me, and it does a lot for you, .
So for those of you who showed up in person, thank you for being so patient. And for the rest of you, I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you grab the book if you haven't already. , I'll link to it in the show notes. It is, um, paperback, hardcover on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and it's on a few platforms for audio. I believe Audible hasn't yet approved, but keep checking back.
And one of the things I talked about in the speech is that I've been on a really long [00:12:00] journey of remembering who I am
, Even if you weren't in my in-person party and you're in my virtual community, you've known different versions of me too. You knew the birth worker Nicole, you knew the business coaching Nicole, you've known the podcasting Nicole, the energy work Nicole, author Nicole, motherhood Nicole, grief Nicole.
Whatever identity comes to mind when you think of me And I used to be a little bit worried about people perceiving this as wishy-washy and that I can't quite figure out what it is that I wanna do and who I wanna be. And I am not sorry for evolution, my personal evolution
, And I hope this gives you permission as well to evolve and to shift and change, because you aren't required to continue creating what an earlier version of you created just because people, , associated you with it. And so my question for you here is, what version of yourself are you still trying to maintain simply because other people knew and loved her?
And are you [00:13:00] restricting your own personal expansion and evolution by staying in that box?
Now, another thing that I talked about in the speech was my own personal evolution with visibility and allowing myself to be more visible to the public which ironically I'm recording this episode on audio only, but that's not because I have an issue being visible. , It's because I don't feel like it today and the camera on my laptop is not functioning, and this is just easier, and I don't have a lot of time before I have to go get my kids in car line.
So as I said in the speech, 10 years ago, I couldn't have imagined doing this. Speaking into the microphone felt terrifying. Making videos, putting my thoughts and ideas out into the world was a hard no for me. And writing intimately about my relationship with my mom and then allowing other people to read it was unfathomable.
And truthfully, when I first started sharing publicly, I was talking about clothes. I blogged about fashion because clothes felt safe. So I [00:14:00] wanna sit with that for a minute because I don't wanna dismiss that version of me. I wasn't shallow, and I wasn't hiding. I was sharing at the level from which I was ready to be seen.
And I think that's important to anchor in because if you're just starting out and you wanna start sharing but you feel a little hesitant, the thing is you don't go from being terrified of visibility to writing a memoir overnight. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of little acts, micro moments of visibility in between.
There may be a blog post, there may be starting a website, there may be taking photos at a branding shoot, recording a video, and, and in that video, possibly having 35 takes before you get one one-minute video that feels good enough to share. You may have started a podcast or had a really vulnerable conversation, shared a story, or taught a course, taught a workshop, , and maybe even started writing a book.
And the thing is, along the journey of doing all of those things, you become increasingly comfortable and [00:15:00] confident being more visible
Being seen is not the same thing as being completely exposed
Privacy doesn't make you inauthentic
Having discernment of what you want to share and what you don't wanna share is part of mature visibility
And some of the questions that I ask myself when I'm deciding what to share is, number one, what am I sharing? Number two, why am I sharing it? And number three, can something I've lived serve someone else if I allow it to be seen? Can this be turned into a helpful lesson or message? There are stories that I share because I've processed them, and they can serve other people and help other people , there are stories that I'm still living and not everything that's meaningful in your life has to become content
My question to you is, what are you ready to say and at what level are you ready to be seen now? You're allowed to have healthy boundaries and parameters [00:16:00] not what you should share, not what would perform the best, not what the algorithm wants, but what feels true to who you are in this moment.
And like I said in the speech, can you trust the unfolding? That's what me coming back to the microphone is really doing, is me trusting the unfolding of what's to come on the show. What I do know for sure is that I, I wanna talk again. And interestingly, as I've been thinking about finding my way back to my voice, I've also felt this pull toward work that I haven't talked about in quite some time, and helping other people find and use their voices.
I've been podcasting since 2019. I've taught podcasting. I've helped people launch their shows. And lately, I've been thinking about that work again, but in a completely new way, and we're gonna talk about that too
If that's been something that's been on your heart, then you should know that I do have a podcasting course that's a DIY style course on demand. It's available now. I'll link to it in the show notes. , And I'm also opening a small number of private podcasts in a day [00:17:00] intensives for people who already know that they've been wanting to launch a show, but the logistics are holding you back from getting it out into the world
If you have any questions or you wanna chat more about what that looks like, as always, feel free to reach out to me. I'll leave all the relevant links in the show notes, and I will talk to you soon