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When I was a young girl, hard-wired tight and oh so sensitive, I forced myself to look impenetrable, on the outside. So attuned to the gaze of other eyes on me that I retreated, to the inside. Safe and calm to make myself feel safe and calm. But I couldn’t open my mouth to speak, for fear of judgment or condemnation, to be seen as silly or stupid. Making myself into an other, not a me. I kept my eyes trained on myself, as though from the other side of the room, the point of view of another person, a parent, a teacher, a boy, a stranger. My question only-who do you think I am? Only guessing at their answers from a small glance, a question, or a turning on their heels to walk away, uninterested, uninteresting. An out-of-body experience I know now.

No wonder, turning twelve or thirteen, that I wished to become invisible, my body taking over my self, boys becoming the deciders, to turn into men who would believe the same. Leaving the young girls to grow into women who waited, who only replied, who were told what to do and be; exceptions, more than half of the world, of the human capacity for agency, or choice or control of the only life given them. Funny that so many had been taught to sit by the phone, never dial it themselves, or just wait patiently for the proposal from him, and allotted a single-word reply.

I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at seventeen, high-school drop-out because it took too much to walk the halls between classes, feeling all eyes upon me, self-conscious. And so shy that, when faced with the mandatory monologue in speech class, I would not sleep for days, fearing my face would turn blood red, my voice crack and I’d stop breathing, which of course I did. My wish to retreat from their gaze, unable to think clearly or know even what I wanted to think, say or feel.

Reading Woolf’s proposition, to all writers and women in particular, that there should be a space apart, away from the maddening crowd, for women to just think and write what they think, to momentarily relax and just be left alone. Yes, to be invisible for a time. So necessary for those imposed upon or marginal, to develop a voice and a thought, singular, unique, powerful. Like Thoreau in the woods, or Tolstoy at his wooden desk, tracing out streams of thought to ink to paper, in solitude and with all the time in the world.

Of course, once the babies were born and tended and fed, homework finished and dishes washed, there was very little time left. Full of stories though, observations really, theory and practice of a woman, a writer constrained. So when I finally, maybe, had it all figured out, been around the block a few times, and knew how to form a complete sentence, by then no one bothered to listen. Invisibility once wished for, having now been granted.

I sat down for tea once with an older buddhist nun. I had seen her at the retreat walking bundled through the snow to the temple, hunched over and sitting quiet in the back each session. I asked her what was still hard for her, and she answered so easily, that it was difficult being invisible. I get it now. The monk on the throne in front of us was allotted ninety minutes to talk, for four sessions a day, seven days we sat in silence, just listening to his every word. She too had some words to say, no doubt, had read the sutras, studied the dharma, had decades of lessons and experiences, a rich and full life, but now was never asked. No one seemed to bother themselves with her. Or even glance in her direction.

Oh, the lesson in that. To go from objectified to invisible in the span of sixty years, a shame I see, and such a waste. My lesson now to ask them what they think and listen carefully to their words. And for myself, to speak up and not give a fuck what the look on their face. My clock is ticking, it’s a bomb I feel really, and I will explode soon if I don’t open my mouth.