Invisibility

I do my best to be invisible. Not Invisible Girl invisible, not clear, but chameleon invisible, blending in so well that no one realizes I am here. I am not always silent or always speaking. Either extreme gets noticed. I do not refuse to go out nor involve myself in every little thing. I do just enough to avoid suspicion. I wait and watch in unfamiliar situations and then I act like everyone is, but just enough to not stand out. I make being polite and considerate a high priority and do my very best to think well of everyone, give them the benefit of the doubt, and be respectful even on the rare occasions when I have to make a complaint.

I do not expect special treatment and I get extremely annoyed with people who do. I am quite conscious of boundaries and get embarrassed for those who are not. I also like to think that I hold realistic expectations. For example, when it comes to my doctors, I hold no illusions that I am anything to them simply because they are special and important to me. I only have one therapist and he means the world to me. I only have one psychiatrist and one GP and I enjoy noticing the little things about them. But they each have tons of patients and I do not expect them to hold me any higher than any of them.

And yet.....

I can't help but wish, sometimes, that I was important to them, that I was someone special, that I was the kind of person they want to give special treatment to. I want to be the patient that makes them smile when they see my name on the schedule. I want them to remember me from visit to visit. I want them to feel emotionally invested in me. I want to be the kind of patient that The Shrink thinks about at times other than in session. (I don't mean in an inappropriate way - that's creepy!)

I know several people who have given their shrinks the URL to their blogs. And way more often than not the shrinks are more than happy to discuss the blogs in session, but they don't actually go visit them. Or they give them things to read and the shrinks either read them in session or don't read them at all. But there are a few cases where the shrinks do go read the blogs, they do read things outside of sessions, they do think about them outside of their scheduled times.

And sometimes I wish I was that kind of person - someone who means enough to a shrink that they go a few extra steps farther than they have to because they want to. Most of the time, I am content being invisible. When I tell people I'm fine, I want them to believe me. When I don't want noticed, I want to blend in seamlessly. Whether I am present or not, I don't want it to make a difference. But sometimes...

The Shrink told me once that he showed a short story I wrote to another patient, a little girl who had been through something similar to me. He maintained privacy in every way, of course. When he told me that, the swirl of feelings in every flavor stunned me. I was embarrassed that he had shown it to her, flattered that he thought is was good enough to show, awed that he had thought of me and the story at all, proud that it had actually made a difference to the girl, frustrated that I had broken the invisibility barrier, pleased that I wasn't invisible to him...... You get the point.

There is a book about co-dependence called 'I Hate You; Don't Leave Me'. I love the juxtaposition of the sentiments. With most people I truly want to stay invisible. But with a few select people, it's more like 'I'm Hiding; Please Find Me'. I'm pretty sure this isn't an entirely bizarre feeling - little kids often run away in the hopes of being chased and teenagers push boundaries but really want them pushed back. So this isn't about feeling like a unique freak. It's about feeling silly both for wanting to be seen and for knowingly acting the opposite of what I sometimes want. I guess in part it is because I know what I want but I don't feel entitled to it so I feel guilty for wanting it even when I'm not pressuring for it.

Wow - that made no sense. But I know what I mean: it should be more about actions than feelings in this particular guilt war but it isn't. Story of my life... LOL

Well, I wanted to include a quote I remember from what I thought was a Douglas Adams book but I just spent half a bloody hour searching for it and can't find it. So I may have misremembered the entire thing or it may be by someone else or maybe I just couldn't find it. It had to do with invisibility being achieved by making something so insanely hideous that people would refuse to look at it. Anyone know if this is real and if so from whom/what?