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At a remote writing residency in New Mexico, while sipping coffee and considering the sunrise and Sangre de Cristo mountains, I considered a crime. What if I just stayed after my month was up? Besides the two wild horses rambling by occasionally, I wasn’t sure anyone would notice my continued presence in the old bungalow. This was all a hypothetical daydreamy delight, mind you. I had no plans to really overstay my welcome. I’m a fundamentally polite and lawful person — besides a couple of speeding tickets and getting caught underage with beers in my dorm room.
But a writer of fiction can do anything, and thus was born my novel Three Keys in which my main character breaks into three homes to live, unseen.
This novel, like many novels, comes from lived experience. I have never broken into homes, to be sure. But as a mid-50s woman approaching the next arc of my life, I wonder about the anonymity an older woman might want in certain circumstances and the kind she gets from society, whether she wants it or not. What if anonymity — the good kind and the bad kind — intersect and create a thunderclap of conditions that fosters wise elderdom?
All of us of a certain age know about this invisibility business. I’m forever witnessing just how blatantly our culture erases older women. Female friends have been warning me about this for years. How, for example, at a party, people’s eyes float over them, seeking out someone else.
These days, I find myself trying to remember the 20-year-old me, wondering if I was ever guilty of this behavior. I would prefer to think not, of course — but who did I gravitate to at parties? Was it the men? Was it younger people? Did I ever ignore an elder? I hope not. It’s a tough thing to reckon with — our participation in subconscious cultural sabotage and ghosting of certain groups.
From articles like “The Invisibility of Older Women” in The Atlantic forever floating around Facebook to the hundreds of advertisements trying to prevent that invisibility from happening in the first place, I’m now in the thick of it. I ignore the beauty creams and accept the truth: I no longer attract a certain gaze. It’s not that ever I garnered a huge number, but my 30-year-old self certainly got a few more flirts.
Do I miss that attention? Yes. Does it hurt? It did for a little while. Ugh, so problematic, and so hard to admit. That tricky ego! It’s such a little bully, wanting attention. And that’s understandable and not deserving of scorn. After all, it’s a deeply cultural — and perhaps biological — force that is embedded in our bones: We like to be seen.
After a period of mourning, though, comes the work of transformation. I’m finding it to be true: Once we’ve been stripped of our personas — career or mothering or being nubile — we can become our actual person.
First, though, let’s be honest: There will be a temper tantrum. The ego’s outburst must be sat through and witnessed, just like a child’s meltdown at the grocery store. The ego’s very foundation is those roles we’ve created for ourselves, after all, and so of course that monster becomes cranky in the face of its own obsolescence! But it’s a temporary tantrum — or should be — because now it’s time for it to grow up.
My novel, conceived during that coffee-fueled sunrise in New Mexico, tries to capture the moments when the tantrum stops and the life-rebuilding starts. The main character has just launched her son and lost her job and husband. The “three keys’ of her life’s purpose are poof, gone! Fiction yes, though too often a mirror of a real woman’s central keys.
Worst of all is this: She has lost time, lost her youth and must face the reality of aging. What hurts the most is that her daydreams have had to change tense. At 30, she daydreamed of the best possible 30-year-old her, charming everyone. At 40, ditto; she was the hero of her own mind’s show! But now she finds herself daydreaming of a younger her. The older self is not interested in her own daydreams. Ouch.
Well, what to do? The heroine’s journey is mine: Figuring out the best, most brilliant path forward. If we let go of that desire to be desired, not only do we avoid suffering, but we transform into a creature that is wilder, brighter and braver. As they say, we can “get better, not bitter” with age. We can, in fact, become wise elders.
My theory is this: Once we are not the recipient of the gaze, we are the ones doing the gazing — at the world as it really is. That helps us determine how we can be real leaders, even in small, familial, or local ways. We can decide how to make our wisdom felt in a world that desperately needs it. We lose the ego and transcend it. We come of age, for real.
My main character breaks into home, but what she’s really breaking into is herself, of course. And as we know, that task is quite serious; it takes a lot of hard work. It is not easy to learn to distinguish between our ego and what exists beyond.
It’s our most important growth spurt of all, perhaps: To find the keys that unlock the power of our years. In doing so, we become anything but invisible. Sure, I think it’s highly likely that I’ll find myself ghosted at a dinner party, observing someone’s eyes look right past me to seek out someone more interesting or relevant to their lives.
Though, if I do this right, they’ll be wrong. Whether they see it or not, I will know: I’m a force to be reckoned with, and doing the world some real good. Most of all, this realization in midlife has done me a world of good.
Have you ever felt invisible as an older woman? When? Let us know in the comments below.
Jun Cen
Follow Article Topics: Fulfillment
