The season of visibility

And other ways to see

Apr 18, 2025

Last Saturday, for the very first time in my entire life, I told someone I was in the bathroom line in front of them.

I was mid-dinner on a ripe plum of a spring night, at one of those tiny New Yorky restaurant just claustrophobic enough to feel exciting.

There was only one tiny bathroom in the back, and a cluster of young beautiful people swirling cocktails around in front of the door. I assumed they were waiting for it as…a group?

When I have to go to the bathroom these days, it’s not a feeling of discomfort; it’s a feeling of pain. I don’t fear peeing my pants; I fear that my body might actually explode.

So when a man, undoubting, passed through the group to get to the bathroom, I felt defeated—a lost puppy whimpering outside a door.

That’s when the desperation kicked in:

“Hey excuse me! I was waiting and…[gestures awkwardly to an abdominal protrusion flattened by shape wear] I’m pregnant!”

During the “excuse me” part, he just kept going; during the “I’m pregnant” part, he stepped aside. I was taken aback by how well that worked.

I came back to the table and regaled my friends with my recent accomplishment, and they said I shouldn’t have had to say I’m pregnant, and I said I know, but being assertive is hard for me and having an excuse helps.

A visible excuse, at that.

I’ve quickly learned that one of the ironies of being pregnant is that, during the months when many women need the most help and grace, they aren’t ‘showing’ yet, and maybe haven’t even told loved ones.

On the subway during my first trimester, I was miserable with a throbbing migraine, dizzy and faint, and constantly just one sudden jerky movement away from throwing up all over the train car. But I didn’t think I could take one of the priority seats because I didn’t “look” pregnant.

If I did take a seat, I’d express my discomfort through facial expressions so no one would have any suspicions that I was maybe actually fine.

As in many other times of life, it felt important for me to look on the outside how I felt on the inside.

And I have relished the experience of looking pregnant, which has given me a whole new lease on life—but in the reverse. It’s an unmistakable excuse when I don’t feel like seizing the day, giving it my all, or trying my best.

The pregnancy books support this life of leisure. The only one I’ve read consistently called Nine Golden Months, based on the wisdom of Chinese medicine, is a whole Bible on how to be extra gentle while growing new life.

At first, the book’s suggestions shocked me as so novel, so outside of societal norms that I caught myself thinking, “I can just…do that?? I’m allowed to take the easy way out!?”

After a while, I realized that 99% of the book’s teachings could and should apply to anybody, any time. We should ALL “listen to our body” (a concept I’ve always found abstract and confusing since we’re so conditioned out of it!), and rest when we want, and eat what sounds good.

“Pregnancy is so great,” I hear over and over, “Because you can eat whatever you want!”

The books agree: Eat intuitively, follow your cravings, sate your appetite.

Why is this perfectly reasonable and healthy behavior advised specifically for pregnant women and not every person all the time?

In a non-pregnant body, I have all kinds of physical quirks that keep me from doing certain exercises comfortably. Yet, in a workout or yoga class setting, I often do them anyway, because even though we get the “Listen to your body spiel” at the beginning of class, it becomes quickly obvious that the teachers don’t actually want you doing that.

“We’re doing a different pose, Mari,” I’ve been called out many times while ‘listening to my body.’

Now that I have this appendage to my stomach, however, no one questions me, and I feel much more emboldened to modify as I see fit—even if the modification has nothing to do with my extra bulge.

This has been one of my key lessons so far in this particular body transformation journey: learning that I don’t have to prove my needs or subjective experience in order to take a different path.

That said, it’s a billion times easier when I have visible “proof.”

I can’t blame any of my fellow humans, including yoga instructors, for trusting a visible marker of extra needs over the intuition of students who appear perfectly normal.

I’m not sure if it’s a societal thing or a general human thing, but we all seem to really value visibility—“see it to believe it” and what have you.

A cartoon of someone on fire that reads: An invisible illness is like being on fire, the smoke alarm constantly ringing. But the alarm is silent and the flames are camoflage, so why would anyone give up their seat for me? — I drew this while recovering from Guillain-Barré, often wishing I had my wheelchair back just to outwardly signal what was happening inside

I think about this impulse around the time of Easter, which is all about the invisible made visible. Think: daffodils debuting their completed perfect selves after cozying up underground for months.

Theologically, Easter makes almost no sense to me. I’ve been going to church since I was zero and I can’t begin to tell you what it means to “die for one’s sins” (??) or why it took 3 days for Jesus to rise from the dead (paperwork at the pearly gates??) or pretty much anything else to do with the mechanics.

But I deeply understand the poetry of the holiday. All religions have some manifestation of the divine in earthly form, which is one of the most poetic things I can think of.

And the idea of God becoming a baby, then an adult who laughs and cries, and then someone who dies, is a special kind of poetry.

“Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in the Bible and the favorite of many, who are comforted by the image of God-as-human, crying when his friend dies.

It’s a visible portrait of the divine literally feeling our pain, as us, in front of us.

Maybe Western cultures, all sculpted by Christianity to some extent, are particularly interested in visible proof because of the Incarnation. Whether individuals believe or not, the West takes a lot of values from the Christian ideals of sensory proof: touching, hearing, tasting, seeing.

(How many Christian hymns reference “the blind will some day see,” as though lack of eyesight is its own way of seeing?)

From cursory knowledge, I have a hunch that Eastern and Indigenous cultures are more comfy in the space of not having visible proof, but trusting anyway.

Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how Western science sees whereas Indigenous wisdom listens. Paraphrasing from this interview:

Science polishes the gift of seeing. That kind of attention includes ways of seeing quite literally through other lenses — that we might have the hand lens, the magnifying glass in our hands that allows us to look at that moss with an acuity that the human eye doesn’t have, so we see more, the microscope that lets us see the gorgeous architecture by which it’s put together, the scientific instrumentation in the laboratory that would allow us to look at the miraculous way that water interacts with cellulose, let’s say.
That’s what I mean by science polishes our ability to see — it extends our eyes into other realms. But we’re, in many cases, looking at the surface, and by the surface, I mean the material being alone.
But in Indigenous ways of knowing, we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing — of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge.
And that’s really what I mean by listening, by saying that traditional knowledge engages us in listening. And what is the story that that being might share with us, if we knew how to listen as well as we know how to see?

She articulated something that’s been percolating in my little head for a long time.

Why is visible proof our most important scientific currency, when there are sooo many other ways to know something true?

We’ve all gotten very good at seeing—I don’t think we need a lot of help there. But at least for myself, I could use a LOT more skill in the listening department.

For example, we’ve all heard, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Intellectually, sure, I guess that makes sense (though sometimes I have my doubts).

But it’s a lot easier to extend grace when you can touch the wounds and see the burdens in front of you.

What if we all learned to listen a little more intently, and then could actually feel some of the pain of others even if it’s not obvious? It doesn’t take much attention to intuit “invisible” wounds: grief, mental afflictions, worry, hardship. But it takes some extra effort.

There are people we encounter every day who are emotionally or mentally bleeding out right in front of us, but we can choose not to see it because it’s not visible. It’s harder to turn off intuition though—as much as we’re all conditioned out of it.

Not all my yoga teachers have been dismissive of non-visible needs. I vividly remember one particular savasana when my heart was broken to defectiveness and I was horribly stressed about my job search and instability. I wasn’t crying, but at one point I felt a wad of tissues land in my hand—my teacher intuiting that they might come in handy.

Then I let myself cry, a very awkward affair when you’re lying on the ground and your tears stream straight down into your ears. I was very grateful to have the tissues.

I don’t know how she knew. She must have been listening.

Whether you’re an Easter celebrator or not, there are lots of juicy cultural rituals this time of year in the northern hemisphere to celebrate the invisible-made-visible during the Grand Rebirth of nature.

It might be an interesting challenge to spin some rituals to to sharpen our listening and intuiting, or “the visible made invisible.”

Which needs in ourselves or others do we neglect because we can’t see them? Where are we demanding visible proof when deep intuitive knowing would more than suffice? Where are we prioritizing what we see over what we feel?

These are questions I hope to hold tightly long after I no longer have an extra tummy friend to advocate for my comfort in a world that doubts the universal need for it.

Announcements announcements!

MY BOOK IS AVAILABLE FOR PREEEEE-ORDER:

I was beyond chuffed to get an endorsement from the illustrious Adam Grant for this project! He says:

“A beautiful book on bringing out the better angels of our nature. By carefully observing the animal kingdom, Mari Andrew brilliantly illuminates how we can get in closer touch with our humanity.”
~Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of HIDDEN POTENTIAL and THINK AGAIN, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking