The Invisible Woman

In my aging in place group, a friend remarked on how annoying it was to be ignored because she was getting old.  She said that young people looked through her.  A man I know complained that now that he was old, the workers in his doctor’s office just didn’t see him, although his doctor eventually did.

Dorothea Lange was a great photographer.   Her pictures of the people of the depression, and the interned Japanese knock my socks off.  In a recent PBS American Masters special about her, Lange talked with enthusiasm of her role as an invisible woman.  After recovering from polio as a girl, Lange walked the streets of Hoboken with a limp and a camera; people became so used to seeing her that she became invisible to them.  She embraced two aspects of her invisibility – people’s acceptance of her as a part of their landscape, which made them unself-conscious, and the suspension of her own self-consciousness so that she became only an eye.

In a room full of words clattering off the walls, I often find myself contributing to the noise.  I attribute this to the middle child in me wanting to be heard; I am always embarrassed after I’ve flapped my gums to be one of a group.  A problem with compulsive talking is that one misses the sense of what other people are saying.

I’m with Lange.  It is a gift to be unseen and to see.  It is a gift to be silent and to hear.  The greatest gift of all is to lose the self-consciousness that interferes with connection to the creative Spirit. For me this invisibility to myself only happens occasionally; it is always welcome.