The Terror of Being Seen

Art as resistance

Photo by Drew Dizzy Graham on Unsplash

One year ago, I left a decades-long career in academia to re-wild. This month, I’ve committed to recognizing, touching, tasting, and posting about one wild plant I encounter each day.

No one tells you how frightening it is to be seen when you were raised to vanish.

If you grew up inside chaos or neglect, you were likely a child who kept secrets, didn’t speak until spoken to, and learned early that survival depended on invisibility. For us, creating is not simply an act of expression, it’s an act of defiance. It’s a confrontation with the part of you that still believes you’re safest when you’re hidden.

Every time I sit down to write, there is a voice that whispers: Who do you think you are?
That voice is not mine. It was handed to me. But it lives in my body like it owns the lease.

This is what resistance looks like, when you’ve been conditioned to disappear. It’s not just procrastination, it’s terror. It’s an ancient, embodied knowledge that visibility brings danger. That asking for attention invites punishment. That your story and your truth is too much.

And yet.

There’s a wilder part of me. The part that lived through all of it. The part that foraged and watched and waited. The part that kept humming under her breath when the world told her to be quiet.

That part still believes in beauty.

And that part believes in the radical, almost unreasonable act of making something soft and fierce and entirely my own.

Not because it’s safe. Because it’s not.

Resistance isn’t just the blank page or the dirty dishes or the perfectly reasonable reasons to wait until tomorrow. Resistance is the inner war between your conditioned smallness and your creative longing. It is the voice that says “don’t be dramatic” the moment you speak. It is the shiver in your spine when you tell the truth.

Art makes you visible. And visibility, when you’ve been taught to disappear, feels like death.

Every time I choose to write what scares me, I loosen the grip of that old voice. Every time I let myself want—to sing, to build, to gather the words that refuse to leave me alone—I remind my nervous system that I am no longer trapped, that I belong to myself now.

I used to think I had to wait until I felt brave. Now I know that bravery isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness to move with it in your throat.

Art is what we call it when we’re able to create something new that changes someone.

No change, no art.

~Seth Godin

And I don’t do it alone.

I do it in the company of others who are choosing the same wild thing: to make beauty out of the mess. To write the hard thing. To be fully seen, even when our voices shake, even when the old fear comes rushing in, telling us to stop.

We’re not here to be ornamental. We’re not here to be polite. We’re here to remember what we’re made of.

And I’m writing this because maybe you are too.

Maybe you’re someone who was trained to disappear. Maybe you’re trying to reclaim your voice. Maybe your longing terrifies you.

Good. That means it matters.

Make the thing.

Not because it’s easy. Because it’s time.

Current Offerings

Artist’s Way Summer Cohort - We just started! You don’t need permission to make art. You just need a way in. No matter how messy, you’re welcome here. Bring your tenderness. Bring your fire. I’ll walk you through the rest. Reply to this email if you’d like to join us.

Poetry for Pleasure - June 29 - 9:30-4:30 at the Maloof Foundation for the Arts and Crafts. Make your own poetry playlist as you create a unique leather-bound book to return to, again and again. Click here for more information, or to register. Or respond to this email to request a scholarship application.

SAVE THE DATE - The Forager Wildlife Creative Retreat
Nov 6–9 | San Bernardino Mountains - Come spend four days of wild inspiration with me in a log cabin near the land where I was raised. We’ll gather around the table, walk the hills, and let the mountain quiet do its work. This is a one-time opportunity to create, rest, and remember what you came here to say. Space is limited to 5 participants. More details coming soon. Let me know if you want to be on the early interest list. Early registration will be available for paid subscribers next week.

Who I Am

I'm Michelle Dowd—writer, teacher, story coach, and lifelong forager of wild truths. I was raised to survive the apocalypse. I left to learn how to live.

I’ve taught poetry in prisons, led retreats in forests, and spent my life tracking beauty through the undergrowth. My first memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, is a love letter to the land that raised me and the inner voice that led me out.

Now, I guide others through their own becoming—through words, rituals, and reconnection with the natural world.

Why this matters

Because storytelling is survival. Because beauty is a form of resistance. Because your voice is a compass, and the wild still remembers your name.

Where beauty is feral, truth is sacred, and the story isn’t finished yet.

I grew up in the wilds of California, raised in a cult where I learned to forage to survive. Where the body was something to conquer, and stories were tightly controlled. But something in me always resisted.

I created Forager Wildlife for:

• Explorers of inner and outer landscapes

• Rebels with tenderness at their core

• Lovers who ache for beauty that bites back

• Writers, artists, and feelers who don’t fit the algorithm

• Those reclaiming creativity, sensuality, and voice from systems that tried to take it

This space lives at the intersection of nature and narrative, rebellion and ritual, memory and myth. It's for those of us who’ve had to rewrite our origin stories. Who are still reclaiming what it means to be soft and strong, sacred and strange.