What I had not yet learned, on the night of the couple in the corner booth, was that the feeling of being invisible, the thing I thought was just the background hum of the work, was about to become the entire center of my story, first as the wound and then, much later, as the thing I would spend my new life making sure no one else had to feel.
I have thought a great deal since about what invisibility actually does to a person, because I lived inside it for years without quite having a word for it.
It is not only that people do not see you.
It is that, over time, being unseen starts to make you doubt your own solidity, your own right to take up space.
You become an apology for existing.
You learn to make yourself small, to absorb slights without reacting, to accept that your time and your dignity and even your money are somehow worth less than other people’s, because everyone around you seems to treat them that way and it is exhausting to keep insisting otherwise.
I did not realize, in those years, how much of that I had internalized, how thoroughly I had come to accept my own invisibility as simply the natural order of things.
