The perception stands that as we age. we become increasingly invisible. Nobody has complained louder or longer about feeling invisible than me. (I won’t bore you once again with the details which I recounted with such anguished relish in Fierce with Age: Chasing God and Squirrels in Brooklyn, my memoir about transiting to the wild side of midlife.)
But being invisible is no longer my everyday reality–and what I’m experiencing is more than a compensation. It’s a revelation!
I get it, I really do. I get it when the young folks in my building who relied upon me for dog-sitting didn’t invite me to their party, when the clerk at the cosmetics counter skipped over me to help the younger woman behind me, when I got passed over for jobs that went to younger colleagues.
And while this smarted for longer than I care to admit, I only realized this morning that the feeling of invisibility has lifted. What happened? I got an email from Esther, one of my Zumba Gold classmates who said she’d missed me at class yesterday. Sure, it’s not somebody offering me (or asking me) for a job–that kind of visible. But there’s a sweetness to being not only visible but being important enough to be missed in a circumstance in which nobody needs or wants anything from anybody other than the joy of simple presence, moving together as best we can and hopefully not stepping on each others’ toes.
This is a new experience for me, me who was pretty much trained from birth to see relationships as utilitarian–a lifelong networker doling out and currying favor with every ounce I could muster. Now that I have very little of what I once thought of (and society still thinks of) as “power”, I am clear that whoever is hanging around with me now sees the real me in ways that few have over the many decades of my life.
The thing is, I’m certainly not invisible to my Zumba class, and my friends at the “Y”, not invisible to my grandson and husband and hopefully, to you my readers of this blog. It’s not so much a transformation as it is a refocusing of the lens that once held “the mainstream” in sharp focus while everything closer to me was a blur. Now what I hold dearest and closest to me is in sharp focus and everything else that was once so important to me has receded into the fog. Of course, no longer being considered worthy of attention by some is a loss. But on the other hand, the truth is that I feel more fully present, more accurately perceived and therefore more visible, than ever before.
So yes, Esther, I’ll be back to Zumba on Monday. See you there!
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