Thoughts on Becoming Invisible

Until recently, I’d never given much thought to the idea that as we age, we start to become invisible, mainly because it didn’t affect me. But more recently, I’ve started to notice it.

I first became more aware of age related invisibility almost a year ago now, when I attended a series of virtual workshops hosted by Etsy. To be honest, I did think I might find them annoying, but I was hoping there would also be some useful information which I could act on, which there was.

I have a number of annoyances where Etsy is concerned, and one of them is their runaway success stories, and how it is never mentioned until right at the end that these are usually people who have qualifications and experience in business as well as something arty like graphic design. Obviously those kind of people exist on Etsy, but there are plenty of others who are ordinary people making a little bit of extra money from a hobby and fitting it in around their families.

I was expecting that particular annoyance to come up, and it did. But what I wasn’t expecting was the constant references to Gen-Z and millenials, as though the rest of us don’t exist!

Plenty of people who are Gen-X and older use Etsy, both as sellers and as shoppers. And for those of us who are sellers, lots of us started with our shops 10 to 15 years ago when both we and Etsy were younger! It’s feels almost as though Etsy don’t want us, either with shops or as customers.

In addition to the references to younger people while ignoring us older ones, most of the people who were hosting, interviewing, talking about their shops or about how Etsy works, were all younger. The one exception who was slightly older was a man who was talking about Pinterest.

So apparently it’s okay to be a bit older if you are a man, but not if you’re female. Well done Etsy. Thanks very much.

It’s the same on social media. I could say that it’s perhaps because younger people use it more, but plenty of older people use it as well. Social media seems to be flooded with people with young children, up to about the middle of primary school age, and then it stops. There’s the Grown and Flown page on Facebook, but the only other thing I’ve seen is adverts for chair yoga. It’s like there’s a big black hole in between having young children and needing to exercise sitting down.

It makes me question where they all are. The other people who are like me and are at a similar stage of life. Are they feeling that they are becoming invisible too? We experience so many changes in mid-life. Our children are on the way to becoming independent adults. There are girl/boyfriends, exams, driving lessons, and decisions about their future that they need to make for themselves. They’re getting ready to leave home to live their own lives. The bond with our children changes as they change and grow, and it’s different at this stage than when they are little.

There are changes to our bodies too. Signs of aging, skin that’s less elastic, hormonal changes, greying hair. And all of this in a world where youth and youthfulness is celebrated to such an extent that we are encouraged to spend a fortune in trying to prevent aging from happening.

It’s all as much of a thing as having a growing family, the challenges of fussy eating and school problems.

It’s also a time when we start to realise a number of things. It wouldn’t be fair to say that we’ve grown up. We were already grown up! But we’ve matured and hopefully become a bit wiser as we’ve been shaped by the lives we’ve lived. We’ve navigated our way through parenthood, the school system, house moves and relationships. We’ve come a long way from our own school days and living in our parents ‘ houses with their rules and expectations.

We’ve seen the world change too. I’m very fond of reminding my boys that when I was a child, there were only 3 channels on television and you could only watch what was being aired at that time. If you wanted to change the channel, you had to get up and press a button on the television. Nobody had a computer, the internet didn’t exist, phones were plugged into the wall and were only for calling people, fruit and veg were seasonal, families had one car, not several and people actually walked places. The world is so different now to how it was 40 years ago!

I have all kinds of views about things and questions that I didn’t have when I was younger. And thanks to hormonal changes, it is accompanied by a fair bit of rage! I’m less concerned with whether what I think and feel is acceptable to other people. Instead, I want to know what can be done to change things. But it feels like I’m on my own, or at least on my own with the people who are about my age who I know it real life. Which actually isn’t very many. And it also requires that kind of closeness where you talk about that kind of thing. Outside of that, it’s eerily silent. There’s nothing. Or maybe there is and I just haven’t seen it, but I’m not having to search for things aimed at younger people or for chair exercises.

Sometimes I wonder if it might be different for women who have had careers. I gave mine up in order to look after my children. Perhaps the feeling that your world is changing is lessened if you have the stability of a career. But having said that, not everybody has a career. Sometimes it’s just a job. Also a career in a field you don’t really care about, especially if you don’t care about status either, can be pretty meaningless. And it’s another awful idea in modern society, the idea that somebody’s worth is defined by the job they do. There is more to us than our jobs, just as there is more too us than our children, and that’s the thing that is missing from what I see out there.

Lately I’ve had a niggling feeling that rendering women invisible in middle age might not be an accident. In some cultures, this time is seen as when we step into our strength as women. The active parenting phase is usually either behind us or is drawing to a close, but old age is still some way off. We are usually still sound in both mind and body, even if we have less energy than we did when we were younger. We can start to reap the benefits of experience, especially the previously untapped bits of ourselves that we were able to access through bringing up our children. Often, we feel less pressure to conform, we’re better at expressing ourselves, we are more comfortable in our own skin and we care less about what other people think. Combined with pre-menopausal rage, we might feel more inclined to speak up when things are wrong.

But this is no good if society pretends that we don’t exist! It’s very convenient to ignore us if we’re going to challenge things about society, western culture and the world in general. Pretend we don’t exist and the issues we care about can be brushed under the carpet and ignored.

So what can we do when we find ourselves becoming invisible?

In all honesty, I don’t really know. I wish I did! Society encourages us to spend a fortune on face cream and pretend it’s not happening, then ignores us anyway.

All I can say is what I think I might do. I don’t have a plan, just some ideas.

We need to put our faces out there. There are not enough middle aged and older woman faces where people might see them (other than when we are out and our faces come too!). I recently posted on Facebook some pictures of myself pulling silly faces, and couple of people posted pictures of theirs. It’s lovely to put faces to names and I was so happy they did! I’m going to post more pictures of myself, complete with middle aged lady skin and greying hair.

If something bothers you, then speak out. It doesn’t necessarily mean being confrontational. There are organisations you can join and petitions you can sign. Transform Trade is an organisation that is working to reform working conditions and pay for people in poorer countries, particularly women.

Part of our MPs’ job is to field concerns from constituents, so if it’s something on a local level and you feel able to, you could write to your MP.

So much of creativity is about our response to what is around us. These can be beautiful and joyful, like ripple blankets in the colours you see around you. But there are other ways as well. I’ve mentioned the Oakland African American quilt ladies before. Another example is the artist Nerissa Cargill Thompson, whose work is a response to her feelings about litter and pollution. so responding creatively might be an option.

One other way is to connect with like minded people. As well as helping us to feel less alone, it’s always harder to ignore a group than an individual.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment below, or you can email me at [email protected].