Is invisibility your curse or your superpower?

So many women I’ve talked to see menopause as an ending.

I’ve discovered that this is your moment to reinvent yourself after years of focusing on the needs of everyone else.

Oprah Winfrey

Yes, yes, 100x yes.

I’m learning that we don’t all feel the same way. Instead, many women my age and older feel invisible. We experience depression, a sense of lost identity and a lack of confidence at a much higher rate than our younger selves. So much so that the invisibility that comes with being in your 50s has a name, Invisible Woman Syndrome.

A life lived in service to others becomes emptier when those we served no longer need or want it – an empty nest, early retirement, the loss of a partner.

The expectations that society places on us change and, as always, create contradiction. Articles tell us how to dress appropriately at our age. People make jokes about cougars. A politician recently suggested that we should all stay home to take care of our grandchildren.

We continue to experience domestic violence and sexual assault, but statistics often stop at age 49. We find our health, employment, and assets extremely relevant, but again the data often stops at age 49.

It’s as if they want us to think women have no value once we are beyond reproductive age. That we should listen and get in line.

Or… we could finally break some rules.

I loved turning 50. It felt confident, accomplished, settled.

I also liked to hide. Invisibility suited me, conveniently allowing me to hide my truth, to play small, to secretly sacrifice. I was always listening, avoiding the camera, modulating my needs and wants to those around me.

And then life changed and it rocked my world.

None of us expected the pandemic. I didn’t expect to lose my four-legged best friend. I didn’t expect to choose divorce. I didn’t expect to sit with a parent as he died. I didn’t expect to get laid off. And I certainly didn’t expect I’d opt to move across the country on my own, away from family, friends, and everything familiar.

Not only did I survive it all, I thrived. I emerged on the other side with a sense of liberation and profound gratitude. I will not minimize how hard it was, because it was and still is so very challenging. But it forces me to discover who I really am, question my beliefs, challenge the rules I follow and be curious about my reactions.

I’m still learning boundaries, but that’s a topic for another day.

Invisibility gave me the space and cover for that self-discovery.

Along the way, movies like Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, The Idea of You, and Lonely Planet provided inspiration. Not just because of the older woman, younger man dynamic that gets hyped, but because Emma Thompson, Anne Hathaway and Laura Dern embody women over 40 as complex, sexual, interesting. Owning desire. The older female is the lead –not a mom, not a friend, not an assistant. She is anything but invisible.  

We can be that too.

In the Psychology Today article on Invisible Woman Syndrome, the author Gina Frangello closes with this beautiful sentiment:

I see you as you would most like to be seen. I see you and rejoice with you that you are not 18 anymore, and I would like to go back in time and tell that young girl she was glorious, but that she’s even better now.

Do you feel that? I guarantee we are more than we were at 18.

I am a force. The world may not want me to know that. It might be more convenient if I stayed small, worried about my hair, my skin and my clothes, obsessed about my relevance. But I am so much more than that. 

And so are you.

If you feel invisible, turn it into your superpower. Doing so gives you freedom from expectations, from burdens you aren’t meant to carry, from being the object of unwanted desire. You can use the time and space to explore, experiment, practice.

If you feel lonely, turn it into a deep curiosity about yourself. Who are you now? What do you love now? What brings you joy? Choose to please yourself. Love and spoil yourself as passionately as you love others. It is not selfish. It is self-love.

Let’s want more. Let’s take up space. Let’s find our glimmer.

Then let’s share the sparkle that inevitably emerges with others who might not expect it – the young woman in the drive-thru, the usher at the show, the delivery driver. Let’s find someone else who may be invisible in their service to others and with just a little twinkly eye contact, let them know you see them and think they are glorious too.

Ironically, when you do, people notice.