The Poetry of Transparency: On Visible Veins, Thin Skin, and What We Cannot Hide
There was a particular moment in primary school when I noticed my hands have begun to tell a truth I did not authorise them to tell. The veins that once ran invisibly beneath the surface now traced green and purple rivers across the backs of my hands, mapping a terrain that felt startlingly exposed.
This is not metaphor. This is anatomy. As we age, our skin loses collagen and elasticity, the dermis thinning by approximately six percent per decade after age thirty. Except it happened way earlier for me. By the mere age of ten, the curtain had thinned.
But it is also metaphor. It is always metaphor.
The physician and writer Gavin Francis, in his luminous book "Adventures in Human Being," describes how he learned to see the body as a landscape that tells stories, bears witness to time, reveals its history through its surface. When we look at hands marked by prominent veins, we are reading a topographical map of a life lived. We are seeing evidence of a cardiovascular system that has beaten approximately two and a half billion times, pumping blood through an ever-more-visible network of vessels that have sustained consciousness, enabled movement, made possible every thought and feeling this person has ever had.
The veins appear green/blue/purple through our skin because of how light penetrates and reflects through the layers of tissue. What we see, then, is not the thing itself but the light's interpretation of the thing, filtered through layers of translucent barrier. Even in our most literal transparencies, we are dealing with perception, with the way observation itself transforms what is observed.
This fact alone feels like something Virginia Woolf would have seized upon, no? How even our physical transparencies are acts of translation, how nothing is ever simply revealed but always mediated by the particular light through which we look.
The Body's Involuntary Honesty
In her poem "Diving into the Wreck" Adrienne Rich writes of "the thing itself and not the myth"—that moment when we stop performing and start being.
Our visible veins are precisely this: the thing itself. They are evidence that the body, unlike the mind, cannot lie indefinitely. It tells the truth about time, about fragility, about the liquid machinery that keeps us alive. The body is a whistleblower, revealing what we might prefer to keep hidden.
Rich spent much of her life exploring the gap between what we pretend and what we are. In her essay collection "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence," she excavates the ways women in particular have been taught to conceal. To smile when angry, to minimise when hurting, to disappear their needs in service of others' comfort. But she also understood something more fundamental: that this concealment has a cost, that "the liar lives in fear of losing control," and that the energy required to maintain falsehood is energy stolen from the self.
The body, mercifully, will not sustain this indefinitely. It insists on truth.
Consider what else the body reveals without our permission: the flush of emotion rising in our cheeks as capillaries dilate, tears that spring to our eyes before we can stop them (each tear containing stress hormones that the body is literally trying to expel), the way our voice breaks when we speak of something that matters as our throat tightens in response to emotional activation. Our pupils dilate when we see someone we love. Our heartbeat synchronises with those we feel safe with (a phenomenon documented by researchers who found that even strangers sitting silently across from each other show cardiac synchronisation within minutes). We are, whether we like it or not, transparent creatures. Our biology insists on honesty even when our psychology does not.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has spent decades demonstrating that emotion and reason are not separate systems but inextricably intertwined. In "Descartes' Error," he describes patients with damage to the brain regions that process emotion who become paradoxically less rational, not more. They can analyse options endlessly but cannot decide because they lack the somatic markers (the bodily feelings) that guide choice. Without the body's input, the mind cannot find its way.
This suggests something profound: that our bodies are not simply vessels carrying our minds around, but are themselves sources of intelligence, wisdom, knowing. The body knows things the mind has not yet admitted. It knows when we are unsafe before we consciously recognise danger. It knows when we are in love before we are willing to name it. It knows when we need rest, connection, touch, solitude; often long before we grant ourselves permission to acknowledge these needs.
Mary Oliver understood this. "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves," she wrote in "Wild Geese," perhaps one of the most frequently quoted lines in contemporary poetry precisely because it names a truth we desperately need to hear. The soft animal does not know how to conceal. It knows only how to need, to want, to reach toward warmth and recoil from pain. It pants when it runs, shivers when cold, flushes when ashamed. It is we who learned concealment.
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
But we learned it for reasons. The child who expressed needs that were met with punishment or abandonment learned to hide those needs. The adolescent whose vulnerability was mocked learned to armour. The adult whose love was rejected learned to pretend indifference. Concealment is not pathology; it is adaptation. It is how we survived circumstances that demanded we become less visible, less needy, less there.
The tragedy is that the adaptation outlives its usefulness. We learn to hide our needs so thoroughly that we can no longer find them ourselves. We learn to suppress our emotional responses so effectively that we lose access to the very signals that might guide us toward what we actually want, who we actually are.
The poet Jane Hirshfield writes of this in "The Weighing": "So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance." She is speaking of how we underestimate our own capacity for joy, but she might as well be speaking of how we underestimate our own transparency. How few moments of genuine concealment measured against all the ways our bodies tell the truth, and still we believe we are opaque.
The Illusion of Concealment
And so we arrive at the central paradox: we cannot stop our bodies from revealing their vulnerability, yet we exhaust ourselves trying to hide our emotional vulnerability.
Nowhere is this more poignant than in the architecture of avoidant attachment. That learned pattern where intimacy feels like threat, where closeness triggers retreat, where the very thing we need most (connection) becomes the thing we most strenuously avoid. The work of psychologists Phillip Shaver and Mario Mikulincer has mapped this territory extensively. They have demonstrated through hundreds of studies that people with avoidant attachment patterns are not, as they often believe, more independent or self-sufficient than others. Rather, they have learned to deactivate their attachment systems to suppress the signals that they need connection, to deny the distress they feel in separation, to minimise the importance of relationships even as their bodies tell a different story.
The avoidantly attached person becomes an expert in concealment. They construct elaborate defenses: independence elevated to philosophy, self-sufficiency worn as armour, needs denied until they cease to feel like needs at all. They have perfected what the philosopher Simone Weil called "decreation"—the act of making oneself less present, less demanding, less there. Weil was writing about mystical practice, the deliberate erasure of ego in service of divine union, but her language applies equally to this psychological strategy: "To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world."
The avoidant person has made themselves disappear in service of safety.
The psychiatrist and researcher Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, describes this pattern with heartbreaking clarity. In her work with couples, she has found that avoidant partners are often seen as cold, withholding, or indifferent. But what she observes instead is people who are terrified. They learned, often in childhood, that expressing need led to rejection, abandonment, or engulfment. They learned that showing vulnerability invited hurt. And so they learned to need no one, to want nothing, to make themselves invulnerable by making themselves untouchable.
But this requires extraordinary energy. Like wearing long sleeves in summer to hide prominent veins, emotional concealment demands constant vigilance. The avoidant person must perpetually monitor: Am I revealing too much? Am I getting too close? Do they see how much I actually need this? Can they tell I've been thinking about them constantly? Have I shown too much pleasure in their company? Should I create some distance now to reestablish my independence?
This monitoring is exhausting. It requires what the psychologist Roy Baumeister calls "ego depletion.” Each suppressed need, each swallowed feeling, each impulse toward connection that must be countermanded costs something. Over time, this cost accumulates. People wonder why they feel so tired when they are not doing anything visibly strenuous. But concealment is strenuous. Pretending you do not need what you need is perhaps the most strenuous work there is.
The exhaustion is not incidental. It is the cost of maintaining opacity in a body designed for transparency.
And for what? To protect against the very thing that might actually heal: being known. Being seen. Being met in one's actual need rather than one's performed self-sufficiency.
What Cannot Be Hidden
But here is what emerges from decades of research into human connection, what every poet who has paid attention knows, what anyone who has loved someone with avoidant attachment has experienced: the body leaks what we try to hide. Developmental psychologist Ed Tronick demonstrated this with clarity in his "Still Face Experiment." A mother interacts normally with her infant—smiling, cooing, responding to the baby's cues. Then, on instruction, she makes her face expressionless and stops responding. The infant's reaction is immediate and visceral. They first try harder to engage—smiling bigger, pointing, vocalizing more insistently. When this fails, they become distressed. They arch their back, turn away, their little body collapsing in on itself. Some begin to cry. Others seem to fold inward, shutting down.
What makes this experiment so powerful is not just what it shows about infant needs, but what it reveals about the somatic nature of disconnection. The baby does not think "My attachment figure is unavailable and this threatens my survival." The baby's body simply responds to the rupture with whole-system distress. This is pre-cognitive, pre-verbal. This is the body knowing what it needs and protesting its absence.
We do not outgrow this. We only learn to hide it better. Or think we do.
The neuroscientist Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory helps us understand why. Our autonomic nervous system has multiple pathways for responding to safety and threat. The most primitive is dorsal vagal. This is the shutdown response, where we collapse, dissociate, disappear.
Avoidant attachment represents a learned suppression of this ventral vagal response. The person learned that reaching out did not bring safety, so they developed other strategies. Self-soothing, emotional suppression, reliance on cognitive control rather than connection. But the ventral vagal system does not disappear; it goes underground. The need for co-regulation, for the calming presence of another, for the nervous system settling that happens when we are safely connected. These needs persist even when we have learned not to feel them.
And so the body continues to reach. It reaches in ways we do not consciously register and cannot consciously control.
Like veins visible through thin skin, our need for connection shows through despite our best efforts at concealment. It shows in the way we check our phone hoping for their text, then feel a surge of disappointment (quickly suppressed) when the notification is from someone else. It shows in how we have memorised their schedule without meaning to. We know when they finish work, when they go to the gym, when they are likely to be free. We tell ourselves we are not keeping track, but our attention has kept track anyway.
It shows in the specific quality of loneliness we feel when we have pushed away the very person we most want near. The writer Olivia Laing, in her luminous book "The Lonely City," describes loneliness not as the absence of people but as a kind of disconnection even in proximity. "A city of glass," she calls it, where we can see others but cannot reach them, cannot be reached. This is the loneliness of the defended heart: surrounded by people but unable to let them in, unable to let ourselves out.
It shows in our hands reaching out in sleep toward empty space, in the way we wake from dreams of them with our heart racing, in how our body relaxes in their presence even as we maintain careful emotional distance.
The body is a whistleblower. It will not lie forever.
Or consider this research on stress responses shows that people in committed relationships show lower cortisol levels, better cardiovascular health, and more effective immune function than single individuals—but only if the relationship includes emotional intimacy. Simply being partnered is not enough; it is the ability to be vulnerable, to seek comfort, to both give and receive care that provides the health benefits. The avoidant person who is technically in a relationship but emotionally walled off shows stress markers similar to someone who is alone.
But underneath the suppression, the limbic system, the emotional brain shows activation patterns similar to anxiously attached individuals. The need is there. The longing is there. The fear of loss is there. It is simply buried under layers of defense, hidden even from the person themselves.
Bessel van der Kolk, in his groundbreaking work on trauma and the body, writes: "The body keeps the score." He means that traumatic experiences are stored not just as memories but as somatic patterns where tensions, contractions, nervous system states that recreate the original threat response. But the body keeps the score of more than trauma. It keeps the score of every need we denied, every feeling we suppressed, every moment we chose safety over connection. These too live in our bodies through in our tight shoulders, our shallow breathing, our inability to fully relax even in moments of peace.
The body knows what we have given up. And it protests, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, but always persistently.
The Thinning That Time Brings
In Japanese aesthetics, there is a concept called "wabi-sabi"—the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, incomplete. The tea bowl with its cracked glaze, valued more highly than the pristine one because the cracks tell a story of use and time. The asymmetrical flower arrangement that honours the natural irregularity of growth. The visible grain of aged wood, the patina of oxidized metal, the moss growing on stone. This philosophy, deeply rooted in Zen Buddhism and the recognition of life's transience, suggests that things become more beautiful as they show the marks of time and use, not despite these marks but because of them.
The monk and philosopher Kenkō, writing in the fourteenth century, captured this sensibility:
“In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, “Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished.”
He was ostensibly writing about architecture and gardens, but he might as well have been writing about people, about the way our incompleteness, our visible needs, our obvious vulnerabilities, our evident struggles are what makes us human and therefore worthy of love.
Time thins our skin, making our veins visible. Time also thins our defenses.
The avoidant strategies that worked at twenty-five become harder to maintain at forty-five, at sixty-five. Life events thin our emotional skin: loss, illness, grief in its many forms, the accumulation of years lived in defended isolation.
There is a particular quality to midlife loneliness that the poet Mary Oliver captures: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" The question hits differently at fifty than at twenty. At twenty, there seems infinite time to eventually, someday, let someone in. At forty, eventually has arrived, and someday is now, and the realisation settles in: this might be it. This defended, careful, self-sufficient life might be all there is.
The veins of our need for connection become more visible.
This need is not weakness but design. We are not built for isolation any more than our hearts are built to pump blood through vessels that don't exist. The physician and poet Lewis Thomas wrote about this in "The Lives of a Cell," describing how even at the cellular level, we are not self-sufficient islands but ecosystems, communities, entanglements:
"We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours... They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes [bacteria]."
If this is true of our biology, how much more true of our psychology? We are built from and for connection. The neural pathways in our brains are literally carved by other people. Infants who are not held, not responded to, not engaged with can die, even when their physical needs for food and warmth are met. This is "failure to thrive," the body simply giving up when emotional connection is absent. The parts of our brain that develop last, the prefrontal regions responsible for emotional regulation and social connection, are shaped entirely by our early relationships. We quite literally cannot become fully human alone.
Neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel uses the term "interpersonal neurobiology" to describe this reality: our nervous systems are designed to be regulated by other nervous systems. When an infant is distressed and a caregiver soothes them, the caregiver's calm nervous system is helping to regulate the infant's activated one. This is not metaphorical; it is measurable in heart rate variability, in cortisol levels, in brain wave synchronisation. And we do not outgrow this need. Adults in secure relationships show similar nervous system co-regulation. We calm each other. We activate each other. We are, at the most fundamental biological level, designed for interdependence.
The poet John Donne knew this four centuries ago: "No man is an island, entire of itself." But knowing this intellectually is different from allowing ourselves to feel it, to live as though it is true, to organise our lives around connection rather than defense against it.
Psychologist Erik Erikson, in his theory of life stages, identified the central crisis of middle adulthood as "generativity versus stagnation"—the need to create, nurture, contribute something beyond oneself. But preceding this is the young adult crisis of "intimacy versus isolation." What Erikson observed, and what therapists see repeatedly, is that people who never resolve the intimacy crisis cannot fully move into generativity. You cannot truly nurture the next generation, cannot genuinely contribute to something larger than yourself, if you are still fundamentally defended against connection. Generativity requires vulnerability. Creating something meaningful requires allowing yourself to care, which means allowing yourself to risk loss.
Some people arrive at midlife or later life having successfully avoided intimacy, having maintained their defenses, having needed no one. They are often materially successful, professionally accomplished, outwardly fine. And they are profoundly, sometimes catastrophically, alone.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
Pain connects us. Vulnerability connects us. Need connects us. The defended person, in their attempt to avoid pain, cuts themselves off from the very thing that might make them feel less alone.
And time makes this undeniable. At seventy, you cannot pretend that you are invulnerable. Your body tells you otherwise daily. You cannot pretend you do not need help when you need help opening jars, need someone to drive you to appointments, need assistance with things you once did effortlessly. The body's dependence becomes impossible to deny.
The question is whether this increased dependence is met with bitterness and resentment (a sense of betrayal by a body that has failed to maintain the fiction of self-sufficiency) or whether it becomes an invitation into the vulnerability that has always been true but was previously easier to hide.
The Invitation
So what do we do when our defenses thin and our needs become visible? When the veins that we spent years trying to conceal now trace undeniable rivers across our hands? When the longing we told ourselves we did not feel surfaces with an intensity that can no longer be denied?
We have a choice. The same choice we have when we notice the veins now showing through the skin of our aging hands. We can see this as a failure of concealment, something to be corrected with makeup or sleeves or medical intervention. We can see our emerging needs as evidence that we are weak, that our defenses have failed, that we are sliding backward into some regrettable dependence we should have outgrown.
Or we can see it as the body's wisdom, an invitation to acceptance.
The visible veins are not a flaw. They are evidence of a circulatory system that has been sustaining you every moment of your life, through every breath, every thought, every movement. They are a map of the rivers that carry oxygen to your brain, that remove waste from your tissues, that connect your heart to your fingertips. They are the physical manifestation of flow, of circulation, of the constant movement that is life itself. They are beautiful in their function, in their persistence, in their truth-telling.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his "Letters to a Young Poet," wrote: "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
The psychologist Carl Rogers, founder of person-centered therapy, built his entire approach on a radical idea: that we already are, at our core, moving toward growth and wholeness, and that what we need is not to be fixed but to be met. He called this the "actualising tendency," The inherent drive in all living things toward fulfilling their potential. But this tendency can be thwarted. When we learn that being ourselves leads to rejection, we split ourselves, creating a "false self" that can be loved and hiding a "real self" that we believe cannot be.
The visible veins, the emerging needs, the thinning of our defenses; these are the actualising tendency reasserting itself. The real self, tired of hiding, beginning to show through. And what we need in this moment is not better concealment but what Rogers called "unconditional positive regard," the acceptance of ourselves as we actually are, needs and all.
There is a particular courage required here. The courage of allowing ourselves to be seen. Of admitting need. Of accepting that we are not, have never been, were never meant to be, sufficient unto ourselves.
The writer and teacher Parker Palmer calls this "the courage to be imperfect." In a culture that celebrates self-sufficiency and punishes need, simply allowing ourselves to need something or someone requires real bravery. It means accepting that we are not the heroes of an individual achievement story but characters in a relational story, where our flourishing is bound up with others, where our strength comes not from isolation but from connection.
The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's research on emotion has revealed that our feelings are not fixed reactions but constructions. They’re basically our brain's best guess about what we are experiencing, based on context, past experience, and cultural learning. We learn what emotions mean and how to respond to them. This means we can unlearn too. We can reconstruct the meaning of our needs. Instead of "needing someone means I am weak," we can learn "needing someone means I am human." Instead of "being vulnerable means I will be hurt," we can learn "being vulnerable means I am available for connection."
This reconstruction is not simple positive thinking or self-help platitudes. It is a genuine rewiring of our emotional operating system, made possible by new experiences of having our needs met, of being vulnerable and not being destroyed, of reaching out and being met. It requires what the therapist Diana Fosha calls "transformance"—the experience of positive affect building on positive affect, creating new neural pathways that allow us to tolerate, and eventually welcome, the very vulnerability we once fled from.
Mary Oliver asked: "What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"
Perhaps the answer is this: let yourself be known. Let the architecture beneath show through. Let your hands tell the truth about time, and let your heart tell the truth about need. Stop measuring your worth by how little you need and start measuring it by how fully you allow yourself to be human.
The veins were always there. The need was always there. The circulatory system of connection that sustains us emotionally has been flowing beneath the surface all along, even when we pretended it did not exist. The only question is whether you will spend your remaining days (whether that is decades or years or months) hiding what cannot ultimately be hidden, or whether you will have the courage to be what you already are: transparent, vulnerable, dependent, and alive.
The body knows. It has always known. Perhaps it is time we listened. If this resonated, subscribe below.
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2023Additional Reading SuggestionsOn Vulnerability & Connection:
Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly or The Gifts of Imperfection
Neff, Kristin. Self-Compassion
Siegel, Daniel & Hartzell, Mary. Parenting from the Inside Out
On Attachment:
Levine, Amir & Heller, Rachel. Attached
Tatkin, Stan. Wired for Love
Karen, Robert. Becoming Attached
On Embodiment:
Caldwell, Christine. Bodyfulness
Fogel, Alan. The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness
Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers
On Poetry & The Body:
Biss, Eula. On Immunity
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts
Manguso, Sarah. Ongoingness
