The Unbearable Weight of Invisibility
One of my biggest pet peeves is to be alone with someone who is on their phone. They could be in the room with me, or the car, just the two of us, as I watch them, or listen. as they stare, or talk, into the phone, and I become, utterly, and inconceivably — albeit temporarily — invisible.
This is not a rare occurrence.
There are many kinds of invisibility, each with its own weight, it’s own level of peevishness, from slight annoyance, to downright despair. It’s something we all experience, and contend with, something that can dictate our lives from one degree to the next.
This is what I mean when I say Screaming Into the Void, this is what I’m doing, it’s how I feel. Like every day, every complaint, criticism, desire, hope, is just me screaming into a void, knowing that rarely there is someone who can hear me, and ever rarer, someone answering.
Invisibility
What does it mean to be invisible?
There are different forms of invisibility, different causes, and I’ll talk about each of them here.
Invisibility: the inability to be seen.
"I feel like I'm wearing a cloak of invisibility"
Invisibility: the state of being ignored or not taken into consideration.
"the near invisibility of minority viewpoints"
1. Being Unseen
When you are in a crowd and try to flag the attention of someone, maybe someone important, maybe insignificant, and they walk past you, or look over you, or walk away, you are unseen. You are invisible to the person, or entity, you desire attention from. This is innocuous.
There are millions of ways that we are unseen. From those above us we are unseeable. This is what causes leaders to look onto the gathering masses of hungry rabble and proclaim, “Let them eat cake!”
I can shake my fist to the rafters as often, and as passionately as I’d like, I could yell and scream for change, for progress, for anything, and, as if I were an ant, I could be stepped over, unseen by those I aim for.
To those around us, we may wish their attention, and fail. You might see someone who has caught your eye, and want to speak with them, you might imagine a whole universe around them, and to them you might as well be the wall you are leaning against. We desire friendships with those who don’t give us a second thought. When they scan the room for possible connections, their mind skips you. You search for recognition, you jump and flail and shake your arms, to no avail. You are invisible.
This shrinks us.
2. Being Ignored
When I sit in a room with someone on their phone, and we are alone, they know I’m there, yet they choose to ignore me, turning me invisible in the process.
We all have experienced this invisibility cloak from those around us. I am here, I am with you, I want to be seen, heard, and yet you turn me invisible. Now, I admit this is a melodramatic way to describe a personal peeve, but think of the times you have had something important to say, or needed to be heard, to be seen, and instead of opening up, you are shut down. It may not even be malicious, but there are times when you are waiting for someone’s attention and you feel like a child. tugging at your mom’s pants saying, “Mommy, mommy, mommy!”
We experience this with friends, with loved ones, coworkers, peers, everyone, all our lives. Often, especially when I was younger, I would become frustrated with my friends when they would talk over me, or not let me finish telling a story, feeling disregarded. Truthfully, I told stories, like a meandering hitchhiker starting and stopping at incongruent and nonsensical places. My friends would later lovingly describe this to me, and since then I have become far more succinct, sometimes.
Growing up with two older brothers I grew accustomed to being ignored. For much of my life, and quite often still, I have been just the annoying little brother. For this reason what I do or say would often not receive attention, or care, and I would be ignored, tossed aside. Maybe this is why being ignored is such a peeve to me.
3. Being Unheard
There are days where I am teaching and feel like I am talking to a brick wall. Every teacher can relate to this: around Spring Break, Winter Break, close to Summer, beginning of the school year, any day that ends with a Y.
Yesterday I was coaching a group of 7th grade girls in track, I was responsible for the conditioning station, naturally the least favorite station for any middle school athlete, and these girls had no interest in doing any of the workouts I had in mind for them. I would tell them to do wall sits, they’d somersault around the gym, I would tell them to do squats, they’d twerk, I went to grab jump ropes, and when I came back they had formed an 8 girl stack of bodies on the gym floor. (I wish I was exaggerating.) Quite frankly I wanted to scream. But as every teacher will tell you, the moment you lose your cool, all credibility and authority is out the window. So I kept cool, and 5 minutes later they were being yelled at by a different coach. Justice.
Being unheard can happen anywhere, for any number of reasons or intention, but it never fails to shrink you, to make you less and less visible with each successive unheard word. People have been in meetings where their suggestions go unheard, been with friends where you can’t get a word in from their incessant chattering, as you watch from the sideline trying to find a moment to jump in without getting splattered with incoming word vomit.
Think about a time you were with a coworker, or a classmate, or a friend and each time you try to talk you are interrupted, or stopped, or downright ignored. You get frustrated. You feel small, and tossed aside.
I have a stutter. It’s an inconsistent stutter, and many people who know me might never have heard it. It comes out at fairly specific times: 1. During job interviews, (which is just wonderful), and 2. When I’ve been interrupted. If I’m talking and someone interrupts me, or talks over me, I find it extremely hard to continue talking, or jump back in where I left off, it leaves me with the choice of either a. shutting up, or b. stutter continuously until I can regain my footing, and that’s only if the people I’m with have stopped talking. This stutter makes this kind of invisibility all the more painful for me, it adds in the embarrassment of being unable to talk, when the reason I was interrupted was probably because what I was saying was already not of interest to the people I was trying to talk to. It’s my minds way of telling my mouth to stop boring people.
4. Being Forgettable
There’s a really great book I read last year by V.E Schwab called The Invisible Life of Addie Larue.
The story is about a girl named Addie who makes a deal with a god/demon/evil entity to live forever, in exchange she becomes forgotten, immediately, once she leaves a room any memory, any footprint of herself disappears. She lives for hundreds of years like this, coming and going through cities, countries, peoples lives, making no impact, creating no memory. She deems herself invisible.
What is a person if not the marks they leave behind?
- The Invisible Life of Addie Larue
Being forgettable has always been a fear of mine, and appropriately I have been called many many things, but up to this point I have not been called forgettable, and for that I am grateful.
Being forgotten is it’s own type of invisibility. Mental invisibility, emotional. Once we forget someone they no longer exist for us. This is why it always stings when you see someone you have met many times and they reach out to introduce themselves to you like you’ve never met. What that means is they have forgotten you, what that means is, up to this exact moment you have not existed to this person, and if past becomes future, you will disappear yet again.
When we leave no marks or memories in our wake, we are like walking ghosts; touching nothing, impacting nothing, changing nothing. What we all strive for, to one degree or another, is to create something to leave behind. To be worthy of memory. To some people that’s a business, or a bank account, to others its influence, or perspectives, a piece of art, a lasting contribution to the world. To each their own.
To leave no impact, whether on a small scale, or large, is to live an invisible life. Something that, to me, seems impossible to do. Often this comes down to more a feeling: I feel like I leave no impact. I feel like I am easily forgettable, at least to where I am and who I’m with.
I remember going on Birthright (a free trip for groups of Jewish young adults to Israel) and for much of the trip I felt as if I stood on the sideline. Many of the others on the trip knew each other, went to camp together, some even grew up together. I was a stranger. I did what I could to make the most of it, and I did enjoy myself and had a great time, even without being concerned about the lasting memory from others. Then the strangest thing happened when we arrived back to the states. A girl, one of the more popular ones, came to me and hugged me, and told me she’d really miss me and that she really enjoyed getting to know me and felt that I was a very fun and positive person to be around. I was floored. I had no idea I had made any impact on this person, let alone one that warranted this. Strangely, I felt seen.
The Unbearable Weight of Invisibility
I named this post The Unbearable Weight of Invisibility, partly because it’s a play on the title of one of my favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera, but also because I find it’s an apt description. Being invisible is an unbearable weight.
When I think about my greatest anxieties, I think about the things I am powerless against, the issues I am invisible, against. I can scream all the change I desire into the world, and it will die in the void. I am only one person, and the world has over 8 billion. I am invisible to virtually 8 billion people. I am not only being ignored by one person on their phone. I do not even exist, in the grand scheme of things.
We all want to matter. We all want our memories, our creations, whether good or bad, to make a difference. We want to make an impact. We want our lives to mean something. We want our pain, sorrow, grief, and misery to be for something, to be made worth it. We want our existence to be justified.
This is why it becomes painful to be unseen, to be invisible to those around us; it’s a reminder of the wider world, it’s ambivalence towards us. Every time you are walked past, disregarded, ignored, cast aside, you are being reminded that the world does not care about you, not really, and the closer the person is to you, the more painful it becomes, making you want to scream, “To you, at least, I must be worth your attention!”
The unbearable weight of invisibility is the reckoning that the statistical probability of meaning something to the world is infinitesimal. It is our desire to deny that probability. It is our desire to choose visibility, or at least the illusion of it. It is our wish that, at least to those we profess to love, our existence is worthwhile. This is why it bothers us when we are alone with a friend who is ignoring us, on their phone, passive in their presence. It is why it means the world when someone grabs you in an embrace and tells you, “To me, you matter.”
And maybe we do. Maybe we matter because we choose to.
I’m joining a false movement in San Francisco
I’m frowning and hunched over in Boston
I’m smiling in Los Angeles like I’ve got fishhooks in the corners of my mouth
And I’m celebrating on weekends
Because there are 7 billion 47 million people on the planet
And I have the audacity to think I matter
I know it’s a lie but I prefer it to the alternative
-Tiny Glowing Screens pt. 2, Watsky