The Bearable Awesomeness of Being… Invisible.
{Photo via anetaivanova.com}
I’m invisible. People see me, I suppose, but no one speaks to me. I can’t tell you how liberating it is, but stick around, ’cause I’m here to try.
I’ve lived in this beautiful, insane country for six years. In the early days, I subscribed to the when in Rome sentiment. I bought a whole wardrobe of denizen style and wore it the way the locals did — three sizes too small and really <winces> really up my crack.
In hindsight, my chance of winning that Brazilian stamp of locally-made, with my blue eyes and short hair, was always zero.
By extension of no one talking to me, I also have no friends. The result is that I feel deliciously alone. So alone, I forget to think of myself as others might see me. I know deliciously alone doesn’t sound like a great prize, but it’s a real game-changer.
See, if I felt only alone, I might have thought that something was missing. But the deliciously part of feeling alone comes from sensing a connection with everything at the same time. Maybe it’s a paradox.
It used to be without the deliciousness
I walked through the streets of Copacabana yesterday, when a rain storm caught me unprepared. I recalled a similar downpour I had run through when I lived in Tokyo.
How different I was back then: supremely self-conscious and omnipotently aware of how I looked and moved (and spoke and breathed and blinked… Argh!). I felt like everybody was looking, and pointing, and talking about me. And most of the time it was true. It was Japan after all. I was gaijin.
Ironically, I felt completely invisible in Japan; hidden in plain sight.
I was seen more as a symbol, a character on TV rather than authentically me. Apparently I appointed passers-by to be the judge and jury of who I was; mental S&M, day and night. Probably more M than S if truth be told. Actually, just M. Can the real truth please stand up?
In Tokyo, I was invisible and paranoid. In Rio de Janeiro, I am invisible and free. What happened?
The short answer: Confidence.
Confidence – Emotional Intelligence = Insecurity
You know the other day, when Einstein said, Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another? I think about this probably more often than most, especially the Chinese 5 Element version:
Metal to Water to Wood to Fire to Earth
The element before nourishes the element after, and it will control the element after that. A husband of mine replaces the elements with a concept as a way to understand them better. He will say:
Support (nourishes) Adaptability (nourishes) Expansion (nourishes) Effortlessness (nourishes) Invisibility
And that, ladies and gentlemen, could easily be chapter headings for my life story — starting after I got my act together, that is.
I guess a better word to describe how I felt in Tokyo is irrelevant, which is the opposite of invisible, when you think about it. My awkwardness was a product of being hyper-aware of myself: singular and small.
To go from that little feeling, to the feeling I have now when I don’t always feel where I end, is to pass through expansion, a journey of fire.
The fire element is all heart, passion, spirituality and the ability to speak one’s truth. Taking only 20 years, it led Me to me. The more I connected with life, the Universe and everything, the more this seeded feeling of emancipation flourished.
Irrelevance and invisibility are not siblings from the same family.
Irrelevance is exhaustive insufficiency. Invisibility is a connection so secure, one can let go.
Can emancipated invisibility be the unplugging from the matrix?
The bigger question is, will I be able to dodge bullets? It sure would come in handy down here.
*****
{Invisibility is a Superpower}
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