Cultivating Invisibility; Just Some Thoughts
I was invisible at the grocery store again today (I should have remembered only to use a checkout stand with a woman or an older man clerk. Women in their mid to late 40s sometimes start vanishing from the sight of the rest of the population; it's a thing.) but it made me remember when I was a kid and cultivated deliberate invisibility.
(I know there's YA novel in that but I'm pretty sure it's already been written. And there was that episode of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, where I always thought the Invisible Girl did a crap job of taking advantage of it.)
My way of being invisible was to not react to things people said or did to me, since not reacting made me a less attractive target. It was something I did pretty much all the way through junior high and high school. I came in for a lot of emotional abuse at home, so in some ways dealing with it at school was easier. It made me very pragmatic about getting what I wanted, in a kid-like way. I knew I had to endure being screamed at to get access to books, cats, the TV set, etc.
At this point it's hard to remember if it really happened that much at school, or if it happened so much at home that it just seemed like it was happening all the time, everywhere else. In any event, kid-me decided being invisible was safer.
Though one of the big stand-out bad moments of high school was when I happened to walk up to the counter to check on the availability of a book when one of the school librarians was angry and wanted somebody to take it out on. I can tell, after years of hindsight, she felt terrible about it later. But at the time I chalked it up to one more person who couldn't be trusted. I blamed myself for expecting my experience in the library to be different or better; just because the books were friendly didn't mean the people would be. To this day, I know in my non-visual memory that I had a lot of good moments with that librarian before the incident, and a lot of good experiences in that library. But that is the only clear memory I have of her: being yelled at for asking for a book. (Maybe after that was when she became invisible to me.)
As an adult I can see this was all not nearly as normal as it felt at the time and was probably really not a good thing. (Though it is good practice for not reacting to online trolls, and leaves them with the impression that they actually may be invisible to you.) It has given me a lot of things to write about, trust issues, family issues, issues of betrayal by authority figures, and so on.
Nowadays I still feel invisible in certain circumstances and it's a reminder that invisibility is not so fun and not to be cultivated. When I'm trying to get help in a store and a clerk looks through me to the man standing in line behind me. When people who are friendly to you at first suddenly can't see you when they realize you aren't as cool as they first supposed. At my last day job, where I wasn't invisible so much as inaudible. In my career over the past few years. But it was strange to remember back to the time when invisibility was a preferred state for me.
Okay, back to work.
(I know there's YA novel in that but I'm pretty sure it's already been written. And there was that episode of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, where I always thought the Invisible Girl did a crap job of taking advantage of it.)
My way of being invisible was to not react to things people said or did to me, since not reacting made me a less attractive target. It was something I did pretty much all the way through junior high and high school. I came in for a lot of emotional abuse at home, so in some ways dealing with it at school was easier. It made me very pragmatic about getting what I wanted, in a kid-like way. I knew I had to endure being screamed at to get access to books, cats, the TV set, etc.
At this point it's hard to remember if it really happened that much at school, or if it happened so much at home that it just seemed like it was happening all the time, everywhere else. In any event, kid-me decided being invisible was safer.
Though one of the big stand-out bad moments of high school was when I happened to walk up to the counter to check on the availability of a book when one of the school librarians was angry and wanted somebody to take it out on. I can tell, after years of hindsight, she felt terrible about it later. But at the time I chalked it up to one more person who couldn't be trusted. I blamed myself for expecting my experience in the library to be different or better; just because the books were friendly didn't mean the people would be. To this day, I know in my non-visual memory that I had a lot of good moments with that librarian before the incident, and a lot of good experiences in that library. But that is the only clear memory I have of her: being yelled at for asking for a book. (Maybe after that was when she became invisible to me.)
As an adult I can see this was all not nearly as normal as it felt at the time and was probably really not a good thing. (Though it is good practice for not reacting to online trolls, and leaves them with the impression that they actually may be invisible to you.) It has given me a lot of things to write about, trust issues, family issues, issues of betrayal by authority figures, and so on.
Nowadays I still feel invisible in certain circumstances and it's a reminder that invisibility is not so fun and not to be cultivated. When I'm trying to get help in a store and a clerk looks through me to the man standing in line behind me. When people who are friendly to you at first suddenly can't see you when they realize you aren't as cool as they first supposed. At my last day job, where I wasn't invisible so much as inaudible. In my career over the past few years. But it was strange to remember back to the time when invisibility was a preferred state for me.
Okay, back to work.
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