“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”
~ Terry Pratchett
How are you not afraid?
The silent wondering in my students’ eyes.
Aren’t you afraid that showing up attractive will turn you into prey? That your attractiveness radiating out will bring all sorts of unwholesome to your door?
Yes, it’s true: when you turn on a lantern, there’s no way for you to control who gets attracted to the light.
Yes, I have been afraid of that.
Mightily afraid, and for a long time.
Yes, that fear got me to cover and conceal my light, until…
Until I asked myself:
Are the two inseparable?
Is it possible to be attractive without becoming prey?
Back then, I was thinking of attractiveness as sexual allure. When I saw a woman who seemed to be dimming her feminine radiance, I wondered if she felt afraid like me.
These days, I often wonder if a similar fear is at play in public visibility, people hesitating to step into leadership or entrepreneurship. I’ve certainly felt its pang when I thought of starting up a YouTube channel. Wouldn’t peaking over the parapet bring trolls and haters to my door?
There’s no getting away from it: attention can be exploitative. People can come towards you for reasons of their own. To take without giving back. To manipulate. To take advantage.
If you’re afraid of that, you may choose to hide: we all have ways to don a social invisibility cloak.
But how can I teach a dance class if I’m afraid that being visible may bring me harm?
And how can you create the life you wish for, if fear keeps you busy hiding?
The day came when I refused to stay afraid.
I remember a line from a book about seduction. It claimed that the person who knows themselves — knows their own fears and wishes — cannot be seduced. They cannot be led astray: steered to go where they do not wish to tread. I instantly felt I wanted such a shield.
I devoted time and fierce attention to winkling out from the crevices of my mind longings I’d stashed away that an unscrupulous adversary could use against me. I went in hot pursuit to make my inner world my own, safely fenced.
And yet, the shield of self-knowledge grew heavy over time. Why? Because carrying a shield implies a world at war. I came to feel that my self-knowledge shield was a subtle way to stay afraid.
I came to feel that my self-knowledge shield was a subtle way to stay afraid.
To truly dismantle my fear, I had to look at what sustained the notion that my world was at war.
I recalled why I’d put that book about seduction back on its shelf. It spoke of seduction as warfare, a landscape of winners and losers, a winner-take-all world.
This viewpoint is not at all unusual. The word allure echoes back to hunting: a lure is a trap. To captivate means to take prisoner. Seduce often means to deceive or cheat. When we’re not talking war or conquest, common words for attraction smack of transgression. Entice originally meant to incite to sin or violence. And finally, both charm and glamour refer to magic powers, the ultimate trespass against accepted common sense.
Was it any wonder that I was afraid, when the very words of my culture pre-loaded attraction with suspicion?
The roots of tensions between men and women seem to go back a long way. At least as far back as my childhood, when I wished — oh, how I wished! — that the men and women in my family could find peace with one another.
And here I was, a single mother in my thirties, re-visiting that old terrain.
My wish hadn’t changed.
I didn’t want to get better at waging war.
I wanted to hold hands.
The true longing underneath my fear was for… communion. To find a consort, a companion and heartmate.
I didn’t want to get better at waging war. … The true longing underneath my fear was for… communion.
In my search for better words to speak my wish, I found cherish, admire, and adore. I wanted to both give and receive those words.
Better yet, I discovered something unexpected about the word seduce. It’s made of two parts: se + duce. The first can mean ‘aside, away’ — but it can also mean ‘self’. And the second part, a shortening of Latin ducere, means to lead. This implies that seduce can mean to lead astray — but it can also mean to lead to self. To beckon towards oneself. To say “come discover me.” To create connection.
My urge to carry a shield to fend off allcomers was fading. But that didn’t mean I had to live defenceless.
In Letter 4: The 9-Level Citadel* I spoke about thinking of your social and personal world as a garden-citadel, structured as a series of concentric circles, gradually rising to the pinnacle of the keep.
For me, the citadel became not so much a shield as a way to stage access to my world. Instead of having to guard the outer perimeter with all my might, I could leave the outermost gate welcoming — but pay attention to how people travelled inwards into my world.
If I felt uneasy about how someone was showing up in my world, I knew I had the option to block them from gaining greater access. I would only unlock the next-level gate if how they were showing up earned enough trust with me.
Once I’d got familiar with how this worked, I felt much more at ease with public visibility. I could hang a lantern by the gate to my world, feeling safe because I had a way to govern who ambled in and how far into my world they reached.
Safety and obscurity
The question that this Letter began with — Is it possible to be attractive without becoming prey? — came up one day at the end of a Tango lesson.
One of my students — I will call her Sarah — mentioned that she’d gone out to a milonga (the word for a social Tango dance) but hadn’t had a good time. Apparently, she didn’t get invited, the whole night long.
Margarita: Did you manage to catch anyone’s eye?
Sarah: I wasn’t comfortable doing that.
M: So you sat and waited?
S: Yes, and no-one came to ask me for a dance.
Ah! I can imagine that: the paradox of wanting someone else to be the brave one, to reach out to you, while you hide.
It’s possible that plenty of dance partners tried to catch Sarah’s eye that evening. But as her gaze was glued resolutely to the floor, they could not succeed.
In Tango, it’s generally considered rude and invasive to walk up to someone to ask for a dance. Like those marriage proposals announced at a party, it’s such a public gesture that it's apt to force the other person’s hand. Or at least to make them feel exposed and pressured about making a favourable decision.
Sarah had unwittingly kept the channel for initial connection closed.
Margarita: What would it be like to give a few people your lovely smile?
Sarah: I dunno… I’m afraid that it might give them ideas.
M: They should walk across the entire dance hall, in front of everybody, without the encouragement of your smile? On the tenuous hope that you might say yes?
S: Well, they can see that I’m waiting to be asked.
M: These people, who have never met you, should be able to read your mind? If you turn off the light by your front gate and hope that someone will come knocking… The smile in your eyes is that lantern by the gate. It’s much harder to approach you without its welcoming twinkle.
S: But if I smile at everyone, I can’t control who comes towards me.
M: I get that. Of course, if no one comes, you’re spared having to figure how to filter those who approach… How would it be if you could deftly turn away those whose company does not appeal?
Her eyes go square. I’ve seen that response before. I’ve probably worn that look myself. As a young woman, I had no recipe for how to politely send away interested parties. I didn’t explicitly think in those terms, but in retrospect I can see that it felt easier to just fade into the background.
As a young woman, I had no recipe for how to politely send away interested parties... it felt easier to just fade into the background.
The trouble is, you then either have too few dance partners to choose from, or none.
Sarah’s eyes seem frightened.
S: But I don’t know any deft ways to ward off unwelcome advances.
M: In Tango, it’s easy. You just avert your gaze. You already know how to do that.
S: And off the dance floor?
M: Off the dance floor, I’d say the easiest way to avoid those who importune you is to move you, to physically change location. You could say it was nice to meet them, and that you need to go say hello to a friend who’s just come in. That’s generally much simpler than waiting for them to move on.
S: I hadn’t thought of doing that!
M: Now that you’re picturing the scenario — what would it feel like, if you knew that you could shine forth your light, and influence who gets to stick around?
S: That would be… genuinely new!
M: Would you feel freer to smile more?
Too often, we think that the issue is that we’re not attractive enough. It can come as a shock to realise that attraction itself has seemed booby-trapped. That we’ve been in two minds about how desirable the effect of our desirability might be.
These concerns can sit beneath the surface, until in a moment of uncommon frankness we exclaim, “You never know who comes and what they bring. It’s safer to seem ordinary, to not stand out. What use is it to be attractive, if I then have to be nice to allcomers, no matter how nasty?”
It might feel very different if you could say “Even as I let my attractiveness shine out, I can still filter who I welcome closer, and who I turn away.”
In order to do that, you have to claim your right and power to rule and govern your personal and social space.
What would it be like to grant yourself that?
Getting mis-sold
I’ve been asked before how I’ve integrated these “lessons” in my own life. I don’t tend to think of these as lessons. I prefer to think of choices.
The possibility of the “wrong people” stepping into your world is real — as it is in mine.
I don’t know of anything that can guarantee to shield you from all danger. It is rather a question of stepping forth, while the risks that go with it remain in play. The word for that is courage.
The thing I keep returning to is trusting yourself. Whenever I’ve debriefed with myself or with a client doing a red-flag check in the rearview mirror, the sense of unease had been there all along — we just chose to ignore and over-ride it.
This recognition can set us up for self-blame. If you’re catching traces of that urge in yourself, I’d like to offer you a balm. Letter 10 will be about how to forgive yourself, so you can trust your own judgement again.
Without that, we can feel enormous pressure to be SuperWise, wise-beyond-experience — or perhaps even wise-before-experience.
The assumption that this is possible is stitched into the Western education system. And yet, you can only learn so much from books or from others’ cautionary tales. You become an experienced driver by driving. Reading a manual or watching others drive can only take you so far.
You become an experienced driver by driving. Reading a manual or watching others drive can only take you so far.
There is a saying I return to often: Calm seas don’t make for skillful sailors.
The difficult things you encounter and the learnings you make out of them become your treasure.
I too experience the urge to be wise ahead of experience. I too have had to learn the hard way sometimes. And with each new terrain I’ve stepped into, I have (often reluctantly!) had to embrace being a newbie and making what, in retrospect, I would consider rookie mistakes.
A few years ago, I was feeling out of my depth in business. I managed to read the odd article or watch a YouTube clip by a business guru, but it still felt like I had in place half-a-dozen pieces from a 1,000-piece puzzle. I felt completely at sea.
So when I got invited to be interviewed for a podcast, I knew it was an opportunity for visibility which would be good for my business. I grabbed the chance with both hands. Pretty soon, I’d spent all of my savings on a coaching programme in business development.
Once inside, I showed up to all the coaching calls. I studied the materials like a diligent fifth-grader. And then the day came when the programme leader said, “No one can help you with this bit, Margarita. You’re going to have to figure that bit out on your own.”
I felt crushed. What if it was true? What if there was nothing anyone could do or say that would help me with this essential piece, crucial to the success of my business? What if I couldn’t find words to describe what people get out of working with me, and there is no help out there that could help? I went about for days feeling like I was underwater.
I don’t remember how, but when I managed to lift up my head again, I was angry. If it was true that this aspect, apparently essential to making the whole business-building programme work, was something they couldn’t help me fathom… shouldn’t they have checked about it at the start, before enrolling me?
I recalled distinctly that I’d asked during the sales process if I needed to arrive with anything already figured out. I got reassured that they had ways to help me with the whole process, to build my business from the bottom up.
So when the programme leader blithely declared that “No one can help you with this,” it felt like a betrayal. And I saw others on the programme getting angry. They too were disappointed in the promise they were given during their sales calls.
Ultimately, I made a loss on the cost of that programme. What I got was an expensive lesson in how willing some businesses are to mis-sell.
I rued my lack of judgement in betting all my financial cushion on this dud. It was not easy for me to make a comeback from it.
And yet, all tales of triumph will show you that there is no adventure which will only bring plain sailing. We set forth on a quest knowing that there is risk. But we also know that a quest may bring us unexpected treasure.
Gifts of growth
The unforeseen silver-lining from my painful experience was two-fold.
The topic of mis-selling became a bit of a hobby-horse. In my own business, I set out to understand deeply how to tell if what a potential client was looking for and what my work could offer was a good match.
It was only later that I realised that this effort was also helping me become a sophisticated buyer. The word sophisticated could be summed up as “grown sadder and wiser through experience.” As I learnt how to check for good fit as a service-owner, I was also learning what questions I needed to ask when I was in the client chair.
We began today by talking about the fear of attracting danger. My hunch is that what we fear is not so much the danger itself, but that we aren’t equal to the task of dealing with it. It’s our own inexperience that we end up fearing.
My hunch is that what we fear is not so much the danger itself, but that we aren’t equal to the task of dealing with it. It’s our own inexperience that we end up fearing.
Out of that grows the impossible aspiration to be SuperWise: to place a fifty-year-old's head on a five-year-old’s shoulders. What if, instead of asking a young sapling to carry the mature crown of a full-grown tree, we allowed saplings to be saplings? And protected them not by demanding that they be something they are not, but by granting them the company of more mature trees?
When you think of the spaces where you feel uncertain, what gift would you love for your still-learning self to have access to?
The safety I found was not of a static kind, what you might get while hiding in a harbour protected from all harsh winds. With each challenge, what grew instead was my trust that I would find my way, even on stormy seas.
Wise as the winds
What would it be like to feel the thrilling freedom
to catch a stranger’s eye and nod?
And then to still be free
to discover if you like them more after that,
or less.
To be free to be as wise as you are,
and to still be a learner, every day.
Beginning the dance
→ Letter 1: It begins
Claiming sovereignty over your space and who occupies it
→ Letter 4: The 9-Level Citadel
Building your faith in others valuing you
→ Letter 7: To be seen with the Eyes of Love
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