In our networked lives, the notion of disappearing has never been more appealing. Photo / Getty Images.
I can't stop thinking about Richey Edwards, the singer from Manic Street Preachers who ate nothing but dark chocolate, carved "4 Real" into his arm with a razor blade and, on February 1, 1995, took his passport and some Prozac and disappeared.
I've been thinking about a little boy who, every morning got a smooth, special pebble and hid it in a new place. All day he nurtured his secret, that he knew something his parents didn't know, and it made him feel powerful. At night he would find it.
It also stuck in my mind how only 11 people came to Karl Marx's funeral. Change the world and, what, only 11?
And Joan Didion quoting Rhett Butler: "Reputation is something people with courage can do without."
Oh, then there's Doris Lessing, of course, who liked being middle-aged and anonymous. "No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible."
Women of my age often lament becoming invisible (I am 51). After spending decades resenting being the object of the male gaze, you'd think we might be relieved to be left alone. But we long to be noticed. That's why someone, somewhere is doing a brisk trade in wacky glasses and gigantic, weird necklaces for women of a certain age. Visit a writer's festival.
Me, I'm the worst. I used to wear sparkly boots that shed glitter everywhere like environmentally nasty fairy dust and, as a compulsive self-discloser, I wrote columns about plucking my chin hairs at the traffic lights. I had 3000 Facebook friends. If no one saw me I feared I'd ceased to exist.
But something has changed. I've become a convert to the delights of being invisible. How did this happen?
In yoga, I used to find the last pose, savasana, the hardest one. It's called corpse pose. All you have to do is bloody lie there. But I found it excruciating. I felt like I really was dead. Apparently I didn't know how to feel alive if not doing anything. No talking! But after practising yoga every day for a year, I notice I have started to quite enjoy the end bit. I picture myself dissolving like the superheroes turning to dust at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Or pretend I'm a hippie in a muddy field at Woodstock. My boundaries become blurry and it feels rather pleasant.
The opposites of things are often very close and it turns out you feel most real when you lose yourself. I have always been too scared to try acid but I think I'm starting to discover the joy of not-being, even sober. Now I try to seek out those moments off my yoga mat.
I'm not the only one feeling like this. The hankering to do a disappearing act seems to be in the air. In our networked lives, the notion of disappearing has never been more appealing. And not just among tinfoil heads who are prepping by closing their bank accounts and stocking up on baked beans.
In the 2019 book Digital Minimalism: On living better with less technology, Georgetown University Professor Cal Newport describes how in our modern hyper-connected existence, "a moment can now feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself".
Since experience always entails a subject and an object, we need more than one part to ourselves. If for some reason we have never developed an inner observer, we can't truly experience anything, except mediated through others. So we only know we experienced a good birthday because 350 people liked the picture of our rainbow cake. Yet I feel the need to make this very obvious point: that to feel truly alive, we need to be alive to ourselves.
The famous psychoanalytical thinker Donald Winnicott said: "Not having to react is the only state in which the self can begin to be."
But when we live our lives as an Instagram story, we are always engaged in "doing", performing, judging, reacting; a tinny substitute for being.
Nature writer Akiko Busch, in her book How to Disappear: Notes on invisibility in a time of transparency, argues the impulse to escape notice is not about isolation but about maintaining identity.
"Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power?"
Disappearing could even save our lives. The songwriter Richey Edwards didn't make it, but the comedian Stephen Fry walked out of a play in 1995. Twenty years later he said he would have killed himself if he hadn't had the option of disappearing for a while.
Disappearing doesn't have to be dramatic. You can disappear in small but useful ways, like staying home with a cup of tea - what some people call the joy of missing out (JOMO).
I'm not on social media anymore. I haven't taken a selfie for about a year. I have a strange lack of anxiety about being ignored or not invited. I catch public transport and enjoy blending in on the bus. I don't feel the need to go out so much, except to lectures and, when I do, I sometimes forget to put on lipstick. I don't care. I find I like being inconspicuous.
I realise this might sound ho-hum, simply the usual process of putting the jaded party girl out to pasture. But I'd like to argue that it is more profound: living from the inside out rather than the outside in. (The wrongness of me writing publicly about being invisible doesn't escape me - but, hey, take what is useful or completely ignore it, either is fine.)
It certainly bears noting that it is only the very privileged who have the luxury of claiming the choice to become invisible. As my daughter reminded me we have just marked Transgender Day of Visibility, making the point that who is visible or not visible is intrinsically linked to who has power. Tech tycoons seldom choose to put their own lives on display in the same way they urge us to do. When privacy has become a luxury good, living without a phone and not answering email is a status symbol. As New York Times tech columnist Nellie Bowles notes, the rich have grown afraid of screens and want their children to play with wooden blocks.
My own journey to becoming comfortable with being overlooked feels like more of a primal howl than just a cosy journey to middle age. In the past I did not trust my own judgment about my reality. I had to keep asking: "Do you see what I see?" I only realise now that to have a stable sense of identity, we need a special private part inside us that affirms us. There's a reason that little boy needed his secret pebble to feel he had a self.
For children to develop a sense of self-worth, a sense that they matter in the world, they must have first have their caregivers validate their fundamental worthiness. This need is known as mirroring. People who don't get adequate mirroring have difficulty knowing or trusting what they feel and may find it hard holding on to a stable sense of self.
If you never got the mirroring you need, you can spend your whole life trapped in a double bind: caught between the desire for acceptance and the need for authentic expression. Or maybe you don't even know what is authentic, because you truly don't know yourself. When you live for others you lose your intuition, what neurosurgeon Wilfred Trotter called your "small quiet monitor". The poet Wendell Berry said it is only in solitude – invisibility – one's inner voices become audible.
There is always a duality in the idea of listening to ourselves. As Atticus Finch, Harper Lee's character in To Kill a Mockingbird, says: "Before I can live with other folks I have to live with myself." But how do we know what's right if we can't hear our small, quiet monitor? In the same vein, until recently I never understood what it meant when people said, "Check in with yourself." Check in with who?
But I do now. For people like me who have never felt understood or validated, it is an extraordinary life-changing gift to find different mirrors, that is people who can see you and accept you. When mirroring is done over time, you become more confident about what you're feeling and that you deserve to feel it.
Because when you are okay with being invisible, you respect that there is more to life than what you see on the surface. This is good for creativity. I never used to dream. Now I wake in the morning and remember dreams of starting a towel-sharing app, of having a square hole between my eyes, of selling a car called a Fiasco, of running a knob shop and being swept away in a flood with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When you get in touch with your unconscious you can start to live with the incongruence between mainstream ideologies of normality and your own daggy life experience, which never matched up.
I have noticed my life changing in all sorts of ways since I became okay with being overlooked. There is a sort of outlaw energy when you are invisible. Other people might not see you but you see things other people can't see. That is your super power. The writer bell hooks (she goes lower case) described this as a kind of double vision: African Americans in her small Kentucky hometown looked from the outside in at the more affluent white community across the railroad tracks but their perspective shifted to inside out when they crossed the tracks to work for white employers.
I have come to think that being invisible contains a revolutionary idea, the liberating notion that we don't have to be seen to have value. This is a kind of radical non-pathology: recognising there is ultimately nothing wrong with any of us. Like all of us, I am worthy of walking in perfect clarity by virtue simply of being alive, whether anyone else can see it or not.
It feels kick-ass to realise that I might be invisible to you but dammit, I'm no longer invisible to myself.
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