Feeling Invisible: I Walked to the Pool and Nobody Looked Up
Am I the only one who feels invisible sometimes? Like you move through your whole life, people all around you, and somehow they just don’t see you. Don’t notice you. You kind of blend into the background of your own days.
Here’s what got me thinking about this. I walked into the pool one afternoon, and there were some college kids sunbathing, lined up on the chairs getting some sun. I walked right past them, and not one single person looked up. Not one glance.
And standing there, half annoyed, half amused, it got me thinking. Why do I even care about that? Why would I let something like that stop me from doing the things I actually want to do?
The Bible Study Guitar Player Nobody Recognized
This feeling isn’t new for me, actually, once I started tracing it back. When I was younger, my sister and I used to go to a Bible study that met at someone’s house. I brought my guitar every week, played while everyone sang, then we’d get into the actual lesson afterward.
One particular night, after the singing and the lesson, everyone was mingling the way you do at the end of these things, meeting people, chatting. A woman came up to me and asked, very earnestly, “Is this your first time?”
I’d been playing guitar there for weeks.
I genuinely wondered for a second if she was pranking me. But no, she just hadn’t clocked, at all, that I was the person who’d been providing the music every single week. I rolled my eyes a little, told her politely no, not my first time, and moved on with my night.
Looking back, that’s actually a pretty funny, pretty clean example of feeling invisible, being fully present and doing something visible every week, and still somehow not registering as a person anyone had noticed.
Always the New Kid
Growing up, we moved around a lot, so I was constantly the new kid at school, usually starting somewhere in the middle of a school year on top of it. No established friend group waiting for me the way everyone else had. Just me, dropped into a place where everyone already knew everyone, easy to overlook, easy to not bother with.
I got used to that feeling pretty early. It stopped surprising me a long time ago. There’s a whole other story in there about why we moved so much, one I’ll tell another time, but for now what matters is that being overlooked became a familiar, almost background feeling for me long before I ever got to the pool that day and had it hit me all over again as an adult.
What Cancer Did to How I See My Own Body
In 2017, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ll go into the fuller story of that diagnosis and everything that came with it in its own video down the road, because it deserves its own space. But for the purposes of this story, I need to mention it, because going through something like that changes your relationship with your own body in ways that are hard to fully explain unless you’ve lived it.
I have a body now that looks and feels very different than it did just a few years ago. I had a mastectomy on my left side, with reconstruction meant to make things look relatively even. It never quite settled the way I expected. That side sits higher on my chest than it should, for reasons that never fully resolved themselves, while the other side looks more or less normal. The net result is that I feel lopsided. Not dramatically, not in a way most people would ever notice looking at me, but I notice it, every day, in a body that used to feel like mine without a second thought.
I have scars now in places I never used to have scars. I feel different in my own skin, not quite like myself, which is a strange thing to sit with, but it is what it is. Somewhere in all of that, my hair changed too. Through my livestreaming years I tried on more colors than I can count, and eventually landed on letting it just be gray, my actual natural color. I love it. It suits me in a way none of the dye jobs ever quite did.
So by the time I’m standing at the edge of a pool in a swimsuit, there’s a lot going on underneath that decision to just show up as I am.
The Pull Buoy That Changed Something
A few years ago, I started making shoppable review videos for Amazon, little clips reviewing things I’d actually bought, uploaded so that if someone watches and then buys the item, I earn a small commission. Doing that meant I had to actually put myself on camera regularly and just not overthink it. Have fun with the product, do what I needed to do, see if I could make a little extra money.
One of the very first videos that made me stop and really think about what I was doing was a review of something called a pull buoy. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a piece of foam that goes between your legs in the water, holding your hips and legs up at the surface so you can work on your swim strokes without worrying about kicking.
Pull Buoy On Amazon
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I use one regularly when I’m exercising in the pool, and I needed to film myself using it for the review. Which raised an obvious problem. How exactly do you film a product that sits between your legs without also filming your own backside floating across the screen the whole time?
You can’t, is the short answer.
So I just decided, fine, I’m going for it. Who actually cares. I filmed the whole thing, me floating across the camera with the pull buoy doing its job, and in the edit, I put a big smiling emoji right over my own rear end the entire time it was in frame. Then, because I couldn’t resist making it even funnier, I set it to Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Taxi, timed so the horn honk lands exactly as the emoji floats past the camera.
I uploaded it and just let it exist out there in the world.
And it worked. Genuinely worked. People responded to it with joy, good feedback, real engagement. And it sold pull buoys. Actual pull buoys, because of a video where I covered my own butt with a smiley face set to a comedy horn honk. Who knew.
That video taught me something I hadn’t fully believed before, even though I’d been saying some version of it to myself for years. I can put myself out there, have fun doing it, and people respond well. Nobody was sitting there judging me the way I’d always assumed they would.
Nobody Is Thinking About You The Way You Think They Are
That’s really the whole reframe this experience gave me. Starting this channel, I made the same decision all over again. I’m just going to go for it. People are going to see me getting in the pool, getting out of the pool, floating around in my swimsuit with fat sitting in places I’d rather it didn’t. And if you don’t like it, genuinely, scroll on. Go watch something else.
I’m going to be me and have a good time doing it, and I’m not going to let any of that stop me.
The truth underneath all of this, the pool moment with the college kids, the Bible study guitar player nobody recognized, the new-kid years, is that invisibility isn’t really rejection. It’s just not being the center of anyone else’s attention, which, when you actually think about it, almost nobody is, ever, for anyone. People are wrapped up in their own lives, their own worries, their own version of this exact same feeling. They’re not clocking your body in a swimsuit the way you assume they are. They’re barely clocking you at all, and that’s not an insult, it’s just how being a person in the world actually works.
There’s actually real research behind this feeling too, the sense that women in particular seem to become less visible as they age in a culture fixated on youth. Psychology Today has written about this exact phenomenon if you want to read more on why it happens and what it might mean to hold onto your own sense of self anyway, regardless of who’s or isn’t looking.
So if you’ve ever wanted to try something a little outside your comfort zone, something that means putting yourself out there in a way that feels exposing, I want to encourage you to just go for it anyway. Nobody’s watching as closely as you think. And the ones who are will probably just be glad you did.
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Video for this post – I Walked to the Pool and Nobody Looked Up
For now, come float with me and let’s figure out what we’re both brave enough to try next.
Read more stories about the time my sisters visited Vegas to watch my sister turn 12 again at a Donny Osmond concert. Or read more about my 57 year journey to discover my biological Dad. I also grew up on a pig farm in the 1970s.