The Strange Thing About Becoming Invisible

By Marj

Nobody tells you that becoming older and becoming more visible are not necessarily the same thing.

You assume that experience will earn attention.

That confidence will earn respect.

That after decades of navigating work, relationships, family, friendships and life itself, you will finally arrive at a stage where people take you seriously.

Instead, many women experience something else entirely.

A strange kind of fading.

Not dramatic.

Not obvious.

Just subtle enough to make you question whether it is happening at all.

You walk into a room and notice people look past you.

You contribute an idea and someone repeats it ten minutes later to greater enthusiasm.

You become less represented in advertising, fashion, media and culture.

You realise that women are considered aspirational when they are becoming, but far less interesting once they have become.

The message isn't spoken aloud.

It's simply everywhere.

Youth is visible.

Midlife is not.

For years women are encouraged to build careers, raise families, accumulate wisdom, develop expertise and become fully themselves.

Then somewhere around midlife the spotlight quietly moves on.

Not because women have less to offer.

But because society has always been more comfortable with women being looked at than listened to.

More comfortable with potential than experience.

More comfortable with beauty than authority.

The irony is that many women become most interesting at exactly the age they are expected to fade quietly into the background.

By midlife most of us have survived enough to stop pretending.

We know who we are.

We know what matters.

We have stories, perspective and hard-earned judgement.

Yet these are often the very years when women start feeling unseen.

Not only professionally.

Personally too.

Friendships change.

Children grow up.

Parents need care.

Relationships evolve.

The role that once defined you becomes less central.

And if you're not careful, it can begin to feel as though you've disappeared from your own life.

But perhaps the problem isn't that women become invisible.

Perhaps it's that we've stopped performing visibility in the ways society rewards.

We're less eager to please.

Less willing to smile through discomfort.

Less interested in being agreeable at all costs.

Less likely to shrink ourselves to make other people comfortable.

And that can look surprisingly unfamiliar to a culture that has always expected women to be accommodating.

Visibility, it turns out, often comes with conditions.

Be attractive.

Be easy.

Be grateful.

Be unthreatening.

Be younger.

Midlife women have a habit of breaking those rules.

Which may be exactly why they're worth paying attention to.

The women I know now are not fading.

They're becoming more direct.

More curious.

More selective.

More interesting.

Some are starting businesses.

Some are ending marriages.

Some are changing careers.

Some are finally asking what they want rather than what everyone else expects.

None of that looks like disappearing to me.

It looks like evolution.

The strange thing about becoming invisible is that sometimes it allows you to stop performing for the audience altogether.

And once that happens, something unexpected appears.

Not invisibility.

Freedom.

And perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the workplace, where many women discover that becoming more experienced doesn't always make them more valued.

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