“I’ll begin with a reign of terror.” So says the title character in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but I’m not so ruthless. Even if I wanted to be ruthless I just don’t have the energy. Being an older woman in a culture that most values youth and beauty in “the second sex” makes me largely unseen. It’s true, I originally experienced this new status as a denigration, but age also afforded me the wisdom to see the upside.

My new invisibility is a superpower because I have the sneaky advantages of being unseen — plus it allows me to conserve time and energy and spares me anxiety and the despair that comes from slights, real or imagined. This superpower means I can rest instead of react, speak up where I might have shut up, and focus on doing what I like instead of worrying about being liked.

Countless writers, including myself, have written about the burden girls and women have going through life as an object instead of a subject. Aside from the money and time spent “fixing things” and the inevitable self-loathing, we tend to walk through the world ever conscious and all too aware of how we’re seen by others. We experience our own lives through the eyes of others. Perhaps nowhere is the proverbial “male gaze” more potent than in our own heads. Women have internalized the male gaze to the extent that we are seldom in the public eye without casting that public eye upon ourselves, and likely much less charitably. Psychologist Alison Carper has stated that women’s complicity in their objectification means they are acutely alert to all the minutiae telling them they are no longer desirable, or at least much less so. 

Novelist Ayelet Waldman told an interviewer, “I have a big personality, and I have a certain level of professional competence, and I’m used to being taken seriously professionally. And suddenly, it’s like I just vanished from the room. And I have to yell so much louder to be seen. I just want to walk down the street and have someone notice that I exist.” We women live in a society where our value is keenly diminished. Our biological usefulness as child-bearers behind us, we’re also no longer seen as attractive, employable, useful. In short, we’re often no longer seen. In a word, invisible.

Ah, but there’s an upside. We can choose to try and climb out of those life-long shackles of internalized objectification and embrace the advantages of being a subject. We can lament our new downgraded status as little acknowledged background players or we can lean into being vividly drawn protagonists in our own stories. As Akiko Busch puts it, while aging women do experience less public scrutiny, they can “entertain a wider set of choices about when and how they are seen.” Carper explains that, “as humans, we all need to be recognized but as we grow older, the manner of recognition we search for can change. A subject is someone who experiences her own agency, who is aware of how she can and does have an impact on others and how she is, ultimately, the author of her own life.”

My personal experience has shown that being an object rather than the subject is not only belittling, it’s exhausting. With invisibility comes freedom and the renewed vigor of focusing on what really makes us us. Perhaps the public has no use for the way our bodies have changed, the wrinkles in our faces, or the hair we’ve lost and the other hair we’ve gained. But our gains in wisdom and experience can counterbalance our reduced sense of visibility. I choose to see my invisibility as a superpower because this new indiscernibility re-directs my gaze outward. My focus doesn’t have to be the narrow sphere of my lacking. Piloting through the world unseen can allow us to see a world unseen. Unconcerned with our appearance or our personality’s palatability, our perspective can turn outward to a billowing wide world bursting with humanity, nature, politics, education — everything and everyone going on around us. It’s no wonder that so many older women feel they’ve grown in compassion, empathy, and political activism. In her essay “The Third Age,” Francine du Plessix Gray writes that when public visibility wanes, older women might “acquire instead a deepened inward gaze, or intensify our observation of others, or evolve alternative means of attention-getting which transcend sexuality and depend, as the mentors of my youth taught me, upon presence, authority, and voice.”

I’m speaking as someone who painfully recognizes how much trying to scramble up or maintain my place on a scale of desirability has cost me. The waste of time, energy, money, and a lifetime of self-loathing and recrimination. But as I age I have the opportunity to use my newfound invisibility to be a superpower for Good. There’ll be no “reign of terror” (probably). But I’m going to serve whenever and whomever I’m able. I’m going to listen when I should, talk when I can. And when warranted, I will shout. I will pound my fists on the table. I will get up in the enemy’s face, I will run through a hail of bullets to rescue my friends. And if you mess with me or mine, I’ll kick you in your effin’ balls. In other words, when the time is right, I will NOT be invisible.

Think I shouldn’t? Wanna stop me? Try and find me.

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