It happens gradually and then you notice it all at once.
You are in a room and the room does not orient toward you the way rooms used to orient toward you. You are at a counter and the person behind the counter looks slightly past you, not rudely, not intentionally, just in the way that people look past things that have receded from the part of the visual field that the culture has trained them to attend to. You are in a meeting and the question goes to someone younger even though you have the answer, you can feel the answer in your chest, you could give the answer in twenty-five words or fewer and it would be the right answer, and the question goes to someone younger.
I am trying to tell you something true about this.
Not that it does not hurt, because it does, sometimes, in the small way that a drip of cold water hurts, not devastating but cumulative, the accumulation of small drips adding up to a kind of soaking. And not that I did not, on some level, want to be less visible in the ways that visibility had cost me, because I had wanted that, I had spent years wanting to be able to move through the world without being assessed or appraised or found adequate or inadequate by a culture with very specific ideas about what a woman’s body was for.
What I did not expect was the ambivalence.
I did not expect to stand at the counter and feel both things at once. The relief of not being looked at and the small, real grief of it. The way the invisibility I had sometimes longed for turned out not to feel like freedom but like something else, like being excused from a game you did not ask to play but now that you have been excused are not sure you wanted to leave.
I am still negotiating this.
I am still deciding what it means to be a woman who is no longer looked at by the world in the way the world looks at women when it decides they are relevant. I am deciding whether the looking was ever really about me or whether it was always about something the world was doing for itself. And I am learning that being seen by yourself, clearly, honestly, without the distortion of the external gaze, is a different kind of visibility.
It is quieter. It is, in some ways, more accurate.
I am learning to prefer it.
