What We Do With What We Can See

On the braid, bell hooks, and why some things we can only carry together

Valerie Livesay, PhD

Mar 18, 2026

In my last piece, I wrote about the experience of seeing something you couldn’t see before.

Not because something new has happened. But because something that was always there has finally come into focus.

I ended there. With the seeing. But seeing raises a question I haven’t been able to put down:

What is our responsibility now that we can see?

Painting from Anselm Kiefer's exhibit "The Women Alchemists." Photo credit: David McCallum

bell hooks asked this question with a fierce tenderness I keep returning to. For hooks, growing in awareness — of ourselves, of the people we love, of the world we participate in — was never simply an intellectual achievement.

It was a threshold. And crossing it meant you were responsible for what came next.

She was honest that this kind of seeing doesn’t feel like clarity at first. It arrives as grief. As anger. As the slow dissolution of a story you thought you understood — about your relationships, your choices, your silence, the systems you’ve been living inside without fully seeing them.

And she was equally honest about what it takes to move through it:

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.
Healing is an act of communion.”

I keep sitting with that word. Communion. Not “agreement”. Not the comfort of a room full of people who already see what you see.

Communion as in: I bring what I am carrying, and so do you, and something becomes possible between us that was not possible alone.

I've been sitting with that alongside something else I've been working with — an idea I'm calling the developmental braid. The two keep finding each other in my thinking, and I'm not sure I've fully worked out why. But here's what I know so far.

The braid has three strands: meaning-making, identity, and systems awareness — three distinct territories, each requiring its own cultivation. We tend to be more developed in some strands than others. But there’s something that becomes possible when all three are consciously held together — a quality of development, of leadership, of seeing, that none of the strands can produce alone.

What the developmental braid has taught me, especially lately, is where the ground gives way. Systems awareness can begin as cognitive — recognizing patterns, naming structures. But when it becomes personal, when you see not just the system but your place inside it, your collusion in it — that’s when it stops being a thought and becomes something else entirely.

A gut punch.

What Mezirow called a disorienting dilemma. The strands collapse into each other, and suddenly meaning-making and identity are implicated, too.

Because seeing clearly doesn’t just change what you know. It changes who you are. It changes the story you’ve been telling about your past, your choices, your silence.

It can arrive in the middle of an argument with your teenager, or a moment of stillness when you realize you’ve been performing something rather than living it. It can arrive in a moment in world that makes neutrality impossible, or a professional one where you realize that staying quiet has been its own choice all along.

That kind of integration doesn’t solely happen in your head. And it doesn’t happen alone.

Under threat or pressure — in any of those domains — the braid tightens. Meaning-making narrows. Identity defends. We lose the thread of who we’re trying to become. We fall back.

Which is why I keep returning to hooks. Her answer to the tightening was never to try harder in isolation. It was communion. Staying in relationship through the disorientation rather than retreating from it.

Creativity becomes developmental when we stay in relationship through tension. The same is true of leadership. Of conscience. Of the particular kind of growing this moment is asking of us.

This is what I’m creating in Braided Conversations.

A small, intentional space — four to eight people — for those navigating exactly this. Whether the seeing arrived through your relationships, your parenting, your work, the state of the world, or your own interior: the grief braided with clarity, the responsibility braided with uncertainty, the need to stay present to something you’d rather look away from.

Not a course. Not content delivery. A practice space, where we bring real questions rather than polished conclusions — and where the work is not to arrive anywhere in particular, but to stay awake to the shaping that is happening in real time.

If this sounds like the kind of space you've been looking for — conscious strand-holding, in communion — I'd love to have you.

Registration closes March 26. The group is intentionally small, and space may fill before then.