tuckova

On Halloween we were all getting ready for the party, planning our costumes, hair, makeup, the works. I was getting a little nervous about mine, because even though I had an amazing dress, I was going to do a fancy makeup trick I had only tried once, and part of me felt like I should practice it and part of me knew there really wasn't that much time. I spent a bit of mental space on this, on what I would do if it didn't work, how bad it would be, how I would process it. And then I remembered that I didn't care how I looked, since I don't have to look at myself, and that in fact nobody else was going to particularly care how I looked. It's nice on Halloween to dress up, especially if you are hosting a Halloween party, but one of the best revelations of my adult life has been: nobody is actually looking at me all that hard. This feeling of my childhood and young adulthood, that people are looking at me and judging, that almost anything has anything to do with me, this epic solipsism, has largely faded, and ohhhh, what a relief.

And now, closing in on fifty, the evidence is that not only is nobody looking at me, but I am in fact invisible. Taxi drivers, restaurant workers, people in the doors of trams, whatever. In a few years I will rob a bank and nobody will have any idea what happened. Ha oh, I am telling this joke for the first time right now.

No but anyway. I mean: the realization that it is easier for me to live in the world when I can remember to focus on seeing rather than being seen is one of the best ones in my life. Not least because from time to time I forget it, and I get to stress out over the fact that my eye makeup went on crooked and then a little kid shows up at the door as a gecko with muscles and I get to learn my lesson all over again. Nobody really noticed, and I could have ruined my whole night feeling bad for not being as perfect as I wanted to be, instead of oohing and aahing over adorable gecko muscles and ferocious pirate hooks. And my dress was awesome.