Can You See Me? by Abbigail N. Rosewood

Can You See Me?

An Essay on Disguise and Reinvention

Chameleons have always fascinated me—how they vanish into their surrounding, flickering between a catalogue of selves. They are one of nature’s most magical creations with their color-shifting camouflage. We all adapt to our environment in some ways, but their method is visually striking while at the same time undetectable. We don’t begrudge the chameleon its costume, but we have the tendency to punish those among our own species who dare to pretend to be what they are not. There are many names for the human chameleons: fraud, criminal, fake. As a culture, we are obsessed with authenticity just as we are with any unattainable ideals, purity, God, transcendence. But what exactly is an authentic chameleon—is it a plain brown lizard scampering off to hide under a rock? Who are we stripped of our costumes—our latest tech gadget, our polished resume, the friend we hook around our elbow like an accessory?

My mother and I moved to Houston, Texas, in 2003. I was twelve, turning thirteen, and my mother was a Vietnamese woman turning into whatever our new life would require of her. I remember that before we got a car, the two of us would walk from our apartment to the supermarket. Being from Vietnam, I should have been comfortable in the warm weather, but the dry heat felt completely foreign and unforgiving. A nosebleed was perpetually imminent. Back in our country of origin, people, houses, and things were squished together like sardines in a can. The sheer size of the store must have shocked her, but my mother never said anything. We didn’t stay in that apartment for very long and soon moved to a suburban house in an affluent and predominantly white neighborhood. My mother hired a Vietnamese interior decorator who swiftly filled our home with heavy curtains, oak furniture, and dark red Persian rugs. The same decorator also introduced me to Claire’s,  where I would spend all my allowance for the next two years. My mother didn’t talk to me, and I didn’t know how to talk to her. We were both busy with our transformations.

In 2025, I watched Apple Cider Vinegar, a series based on the real-life health and wellness influencer Belle Gibson. She had built a career centered around her being a cancer survivor. Gibson later admitted to lying about her health issues and attributed her multiple frauds to her difficult childhood. Gibson is an extreme example of our chameleon-like instinct. The trouble was that she fell in love with her crafted persona while loathing the identity she was born with. By now, my mother had moved houses seven times, including one she’d built with an ex-husband that got repossessed by the bank as a result of their divorce. With each transfer of possessions, in and out of boxes, the furniture arrangement became increasingly haphazard. Books were destroyed by humidity, clothing eaten by moths, and plates and bowls chipped. My mother would throw nothing away. Whichever house she lived in would be a mausoleum for broken things. For meals, she preferred disposable styrofoam plates and plastic utensils. On the outside, my mother’s lawn was immaculate, the bushes neatly clipped, and the ornaments rotated seasonally. Even in her most financially distressing time, she made sure that during the holidays, there would be reindeer, several Santas, and nativity scenes that she either didn’t know or didn’t care were from a Christian tradition, not compatible with our own Buddhist background. 

Psychologists Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh coined the term, “the chameleon effect” in their study published by the American Psychological Association. They described the chameleon effect as “the mechanism behind mimicry and behavioral coordination and thereby is the source of the observed smoother social interaction and interpersonal bonding produced by (nonconscious) mimicry”. Further, they proposed that “perception causes similar behavior”. To paraphrase Descartes, we see therefore we are. 

I’m not a scientist, but the chameleon effect is apparent in my two-year-old daughter. She mimics the adults around her, especially me, in order to master the skills required for survival. Though it is endearing to watch her recite lines from Beauty and the Beast while acting out Belle’s expressions, it is also a reminder that her perception powerfully shapes her behavior. She loves books, but the majority of children’s books primarily feature little boys or male animal protagonists, even the ones that make it the point to be inclusive. Even ghosts in stories are a he. It’s a sad day to realize that despite my effort to curate her library, I cannot control all the other social messages in her life. When we lived in Vietnam, many of my daughter’s first words were in Vietnamese. Though English was the dominant language at home, her language environment included my nanny, the barista we visited daily, the outdoor market filled with colorful exchanges. For a few months, after we moved back to New York, she would pretend-play with a card and ask for the check in Vietnamese. After about four months, Vietnamese words slipped away from my daughter’s vocabulary, except for one—she still asks to nurse in my mother’s tongue.

I have a complicated relationship with Vietnamese because I have a complicated relationship with my mother. To me it is a language of scolding, guilt-tripping, shouting, and punishing. Vietnamese is associated with emotional abuse. I feel resentful when people ask if my daughter can speak Vietnamese as though the mother’s tongue is somehow sacred. Our society has the tendency to attribute outsized moral values to vague ideas of culture. Cultural practices are only meaningful if the family treats them with reverence, joy, respect so that in recalling and reenacting them, we are cradled in a web of ancestry and love. When a cultural practice is kind, I believe it is like a cocoon, protective and nurturing. But the opposite can happen as well. My mother’s first husband forced a kiss on her while they were washing dishes together. She saw this as a loss of purity and married him to solve the problem. She was only doing what her father had expected of her. After some time, she begged my grandfather to allow her to leave her husband to no avail. Not until my mother attempted suicide that my grandfather realized it wasn’t worth it to force her hand. Still, I can imagine a different scenario, one in which tradition triumphs and my mother might not have met my father and become my mother at all. 

English is my costume. The same way that my daughter falls in love with princess dresses, I wear English with a degree of reverence and formality. Despite having lived in the U.S most of my life, it is obvious that I speak English the way someone does when they’ve learned a language mostly through books. People sometimes think I’m pretentious, and they would be right—I am pretending. Speaking English blends me in with my environment. Only through pretense could I learn to express love, stand up for myself, and ask for help. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity, posits that the language we speak influences our world view. Though the more extreme assertions of the theory have been discredited, it is still fruitful to consider how differences in language shape different cultural worldviews. Fortunately, my “mothers” in English are eloquent writers and thinkers who have stood the test of time. I never pretended to know Mr. Rogers or Hannah Montana, the numerous children shows that children born in the U.S are familiar with. That costume would have worn me down and brought with it a sense of inferiority and fear of being found out. There is a difference between a costume that fits and one that crushes you into its cage. 

Literature is filled with examples of the chameleon effect. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic example of destructive pretense. A beautiful young man Dorian Gray, terrified of losing his youth, trades his soul so that he remains eternally youthful while his painted portrait bears his reality. As Dorian pursues a life of pleasure at all costs, his portrait transforms into something malformed and hideous to reflect his corrupt soul. Not to have an ascetic reaction, but so often the relentless pursuit of pleasure ensnares us into a labyrinth of desire without exit. Pleasure is also good at disguise, masquerading as convenience, hatred, anger, even suffering, or worse, logic. Anyone who suffers impulse control knows too well how convincing our excuses can sound. Too many times have I told myself, “You absolutely need to buy this necklace, or book, or tablecloth.” Perhaps what I was really saying was, Without this, my self-esteem suffers. Without a new purchase or distraction, I have to face my boredom, my emptiness, myself. I still remember my first shopping experience. My mother had been gone for over six months with no knowledge of when she could return. To a child, six months had felt like an eternity. One day, my aunt was on the phone with my mother, receiving orders to take me and my cousin to the outdoor market. 20 underwear each! My cousin and I jumped up and down. The number was impressive and we were excited for an outing. That year and the year after and after, with my mother’s continued absence, we went on more shopping trips. My relationship with shopping changes with time—always it was available—a disguise for whatever feeling I wanted to escape from. I never realized I had a shopping addiction until I started to hide my purchases from my husband. And if someone complimented my new clothes, or candle, I felt only shame. To deal with the shame, I, of course, shopped. After over a decade together, I finally told my husband. He had demons of his own, and understood the disappointment and self-loathing one feels when out of control. Too much pleasure causes pain, yet it is hard to know where to draw the line. Dorian Gray is luckier than us in that he actually sees the physical manifestation of his choices. 

Fairy tales often feature disguises—humans as animals, the beautiful as hideous, and vice versa, fortune as misfortune. Disguises of opposites remind us to be skeptical of appearances. True love can come in the form of a frog as in The Frog Prince. In the Sierra Leonean tale The Story of Two Women, fertility appears as a slithering snake and a band of rats. The snake transforms into a soft pillow in the woman’s embrace. The rats urinates on her, but she doesn’t mind. Then she is given a child covered in sores to take care of. After these trials, the woman returns to her village and bears a child of her own. In these stories, blessings are hidden inside repulsive surfaces. The sacred needs protection and only reveals itself to those who are worthy. Mark Twain said, “Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.” In our social media and image-driven culture, we’re well acquainted with dressing ourselves up and pretending to be more than what we are. We are overly concerned with being seen in the best light and don’t stop to ask who it is we are posing for and whether or not they deserve our strenuous effort. We forget that some truths and beauty can and should be protected, or disguised. 

Spies and secret agents are one of our society’s favorite passtime. We admire spies because they have perfected the art of shapeshifting and deception we attempt daily. Even though I know that the United States have a secret service, it still sounds fictional. Part of our disbelief about spies is due to the ironic honesty of their intentional costume—it is in their job description. In Berta Isla, a novel by Javier Marias, Tomas Levinson works as a spy. When called upon, he could disappear for weeks, even years, at a time. His wife Berta waits without knowing when or if he would return. During his years away from home, he marries and even has children under disguise. When his project is complete, he simply leaves. There is a sense that Tomas has a strong grip on his core self—his life with Berta. I imagine it that without it, he would dissolve. The ease with which he abandons his families while under disguise is revealing that he does not and must not identify with the characters he play. Unlike those who lose themselves in their performances, good spies must be anchored to their original self. Tomas’ maintaining his sanity while on the job is dependent on knowing his core identity. 

How we react to disguises is revealing about who we are as a society. The disguised self is also our shadow self. C.G. Jung, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, said, “The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constrictions no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.” I understand the shadow self as the parts of us we repress or are unable to claim. We may react negatively toward those who exhibit the qualities we’ve kept hidden. It is difficult for me to confront my daughter’s aggression. I’m able to be compassionate and empathetic with her tears, disappointment, joy, and fear, but not her anger. Anger reminds me too much of my mother. Even in someone as tiny as my two years old daughter, anger appears to me a towering presence. When she yells, I want to disappear. My shadow self—my rage—looms large in my writing. Because writing brings out the unconscious, I’ve learned over the years of my thematic interests and obsessions. My shadow self is enraged enough to kill. Luckily, I don’t have to commit a felony, I can write. 

In this way, to be a person functioning in the world outside of writing is to be playing one part, wearing a socially acceptable costume. Belle Gibson tried to escape her childhood limitations by completely denying her shadow self and reinventing herself. My mother, too, has had to adapt many disguises over the years—the entrepreneur, the debutante, the grateful immigrant. Is it fraud? Or is it survival? Her shadow self is long buried under the many layers of costumes. Her vulnerable child-self, the one who longs for love and affection, not wealth and status, is kept locked away. 

Before I published my first novel, my agent introduced me to the Writers House’ publicist at the time. I learned that the content on my author website should be written in the first person and that I should work on my personal branding. My social media presence should be consistent with my work. The publicist meant well, and she wanted authors to succeed. I didn’t know what my brand was, but the work of creating one sounded oddly seductive. As a list-making sort of person, I liked having tasks to follow. Swiftly, I sifted through my social media accounts for posts that were incongruent with my “writerly” image. I had no idea what I was doing, only that as I did so, something slowly emerged. If it wasn’t a brand, it was at least curated. Online I was someone who thought, written, read, ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Everything else was trimmed off. My public persona started to take up space in my imagination, more than I had the energy for. I bought expensive dresses, believing that my self-constructed image was elegant. The writerly costume fit and I worked hard to appear effortless. For a while, I convinced myself that my projected image to the world was who I really was. Then came motherhood—it stripped me bare. My ever shifting body, first to accommodate my pregnancy, then to nurture my daughter with breastfeeding, and then the too soon return of my period—nature’s way of signaling that I could have another baby right away if I wanted—had no interest in whether I was a writer or not. I shut down my social media for nearly two years. Mired in milk, blood, urine, and shit, it was hard not to laugh at the friviality of my personal brand. I felt more lost to myself than ever, and more real. I didn’t need a curation of images to tell me who I was. Authors, artists, self-employed entrepreneurs feel more pressure than ever to have a cohesive online presence. Even authenticity has been coopted inside branding—confessional videos of people crying their real tears populate the internet. I can’t mentally switch from looking at “the last stroller you’ll ever need” to the next story of orphaned children in war zones. I had to switch off social media. I now use my instagram only as a contact list, to search and talk to a few people who are not directly in my phone’s address book. Still, the digital costume hangs there, available anytime I need it, always alluring, and like everything else on the internet, immortal. 

On my thirty-fifth birthday, my mother and I went to see The Great Gatsby on Broadway. By then I’d been working on my novel Girl at the Threshold of Doors for over six years. May, the mother in my book, is obsessed with Gatsby. She goes so far as to acquire the blueprint of his fictional estate to replicate in her own mansion. In the final scene of the show, Gatsby, played by Ryan McCartan, takes off his expensive linen suit to go swimming. He is shot and dies in his undergarment. In death, there is no more part to play. In the theater, sitting next to my mother, I wanted to reach out and hold her. I couldn’t figure out how to do so and the moment passed. In reality, it is me who is obsessed with The Great Gatsby. My mother sees only an ordinary story of failed romantic love, infidelity, a frivolous woman who isn’t deserving of a great man. She assumes the perspective of Nick Carraway. When I read the book in my teens, I’d felt the same way as my mother. This musical interpretation of the show adds nuance to Daisy—she is a mother who cannot risk losing her child. Gatsby is adamant about reconstructing the past—he denies the part of Daisy that has undergone an enormous transformation. Love, perhaps, is seeing the truth of a person. Looking past the garments, the games, and illusions. Gatsby only surrenders to more illusions. His attempt to rebuild the past, brick by brick, destroys it. Not only is he blind to Daisy’s changes, he is blind to his own—a corrupt businessman who would do anything to get ahead, not the soldier with only hope in his heart. 

To camouflage, to put on a mask is to hope. We are all, in many ways, hope’s casualty. Our dreams, unattained or too large for us to hold, are poisoned by our attempt to live up to ideals. Yet we must try, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in The Great Gatsby. Our past—childhood, upbring, secret humiliations—determine the masks we wear. If we haven’t been properly loved or allowed to form our own identity as a child, we could turn narcissistic. A narcissist mirrors others not only to manipulate, but because they have no real sense of self. They are able to take up a new persona at will. It is a tragedy to walk through life paper-thin, without an internal compass. I and the people I know who have been victims of narcissistic abuse find it difficult to articulate what happened. The smoke and mirror that violate a human soul are exactly that, illusions that refuse our grasp. I’ve punished and blamed myself for having loved an abuser’s mask. The shame of not seeing past it. Or not wanting to. There looms the question: Well, did I want to be deceived? 

Our effort at self-deception is herculean. We believe whatever we need to, sometimes out of survival. It took me six months into my daughter’s arrival to surrender to the fact that I couldn’t live life as before. I gave up on the responsibilities and work I’d accepted prior to her birth, believing simply that I could hand her over to someone else’s care while I resumed work. The truth was I couldn’t bear to see her in another’s arms, except my own and my husband’s. When family offered help so I could sleep for a few minutes, I instead stayed vigilantly awake and watchful, suspicious of anyone who came near my daughter. I still remembered the piercing pain and rage I felt when I saw a nurse give my newborn daughter her first feed via a bottle. I felt something had been robbed from me. I’d wanted to feed her from my own body, to be the first to hold her, but the outside world blew in like a storm. In that moment—I was already someone else, unrecognizable to myself. I’d become a mother, but for a little longer, I still insisted on wearing the mask of premaltrescence. Unlike masks, transformation isn’t something you can put on and take off in an instant. It takes time. I needed time. 

Before I became a mother, Girl at the Threshold of Doors was a different novel. It had a different title, main character, and story arc. My agent submitted it to a few editors under a different title. I know I’ve already said the word different three times, but I was a different person when I believed I’d finished the book the first time. One year postpartum, I asked my agent to withdraw it from consideration. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the book, but my gut told me it needed to change. Not just a few minor tweaks, but a massive overhaul—a total transformation. If the book is a person, it has reinvented itself. My novel’s soul has always been there, but this time I can see it more clearly. For one, writing is no longer the priority of my daily life—it must fit in the in-between moments, the exhale, my daughter’s naps. Sometimes it falls below my desire to watch Single Inferno. It is one small part of my life. Though modest, it is pure oxygen. Whereas the first time I’d written it as a writer, one who had acquired a set of tools over a decade of consistent practice, now I meet my novel again as a person. I believe I’m more honest this time, humbled by the unexpected trials and joys of new motherhood. I can love my creation without expecting it to perform for me. Can you see me? My novel asks, without the fanfare, the desire for success, the dress-up—without all that, can you see me? 

I can, I can. And I do.

Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood is the author of two novels If I Had Two Lives and Constellations of Eve. Her works can be found at TIME Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Salon, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Lit Hub, Pen America, BOMB, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their daughter. Find her at www.abbigailrosewood.com

8 January 2026