I Want This to Be Seen. I'm Not Sure I Want to Be Watched.
STILL UNTANGLING — ISSUE NO. 3
October 18, 2026
I want People Untangled to grow.
I want people to find it. I want the right episode to reach someone at exactly the right time. I want the audience to become much bigger than it is today.
But there’s also a part of me that doesn’t want the people who already know me watching me try.
There. I said it.
I realize how ridiculous that sounds.
I built something public. I attached my name, my face, my voice, and some very personal pieces of my life to it.
And now I’m uncomfortable that the public might include people I actually know.
The strange thing is, the idea of thousands of strangers finding People Untangled excites me.
But when I imagine certain people from my personal or professional life watching, I become hyperaware of everything.
How I sound.
How I look.
Whether I seem like I know what I’m doing.
Whether they’re wondering who I think I am.
Apparently, my nervous system has a very specific guest list.
I’ve been trying to understand why strangers sometimes feel safer.
I think it’s because strangers meet the work first.
They don’t know who I used to be. They don’t have a previous version of me sitting in their heads. They aren’t comparing the person on the screen to the executive, consultant, friend, or family member they’ve known in another part of my life.
They simply decide whether what I’m saying means something to them.
People who already know me bring history into the room.
And I’m beginning to realize that being seen trying may be more vulnerable for me than being seen succeeding—or even failing.
Because trying reveals the wanting.
I can handle someone deciding they don’t like the podcast. What unnerves me is someone seeing how badly I want it to work.
Wanting something publicly removes the protection of pretending it didn’t matter.
If this grows into everything I can imagine, wonderful.
But if it doesn’t, people may know I hoped it would.
They may know I believed I had something worth saying.
They may know I thought I could build something meaningful at 51 from an idea that showed up and refused to leave me alone.
That feels incredibly exposed.
Competence is comfortable for me.
Being new in public is not.
With People Untangled, I’m learning while people can see me learning. I’m figuring out cameras, publishing, promotion, analytics, and what it means to put my own voice at the center of something.
It’s just me saying, I made this. I believe in it. I hope you care.
Maybe that is what I’ve been resisting.
I want the work to be seen. I’m not sure I want my wanting to be seen.
And this isn’t entirely about other people.
Most of them probably aren’t analyzing me nearly as closely as I imagine. They have their own lives, insecurities, grocery lists, and things keeping them awake at 3:00 in the morning.
It’s about what their attention wakes up in me.
The self-consciousness.
The fear of looking foolish.
The voice that asks who I think I am to believe this could become something.
I wish I had a neat ending here where I announce that I’ve worked through it and no longer care what anyone thinks.
I have not.
I’m still not interested in announcing every move to every person I’ve ever met. Some of that may be a healthy boundary.
Some of it is probably fear.
And if I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure yet where one ends and the other begins.
What I can see is the bargain I’ve been trying to make:
I’ll take the risk—as long as I can control who watches me take it.
That probably isn’t how building something public works.
I’m not promising sudden fearlessness.
Here’s the question I’m carrying:
What would you let yourself want if no one you knew could watch you try?
Still untangling,
Sandy
Let’s untangle this.