The Invisible Woman: What Happens When We Stop Feeling Seen?
A Two Together article inspired by the Unstuck episode The Invisible Woman
Last time we were talking about grey hair. Inevitably, that led us into something much bigger: women and visibility.
Do women reach a certain age and become invisible?
We did not entirely agree.
One of us was fairly emphatic: no. There are women in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond everywhere. On television. In politics. In business. On podcasts. Writing books. Making films. Starting things. Running things. Having sex. Generally refusing to disappear on schedule.
The other had a more uncomfortable answer.
Yes. Sometimes I do feel invisible.
And once we got into it, we realised we were not really arguing about the same thing at all.
Because visibility is not one thing.
It can mean being found attractive. Being listened to. Having a role. Feeling useful. Being recognised for what we know. Having somewhere we belong. Feeling that our opinion carries weight. Or simply having the sense that we still matter.
Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether women become invisible.
It is: what happens when the particular way we were used to being seen begins to change?
What do we actually mean by invisible?
When women talk about becoming invisible in midlife, appearance often gets there first.
We have spent decades in a culture that places an extraordinary amount of value on female youth and attractiveness. So when we begin to feel less looked at, less desired or less noticed in that particular way, it can feel as though our visibility itself is disappearing.
One of us put it rather starkly during the conversation: I probably am less attractive than I was in my twenties. But I am also more confident, more grounded, more interesting and considerably better company.
Which rather exposes the problem.
If visibility means being evaluated primarily for how we look, perhaps losing some of it is not entirely a loss.
But appearance is only one version of being seen.
Sometimes it is the role that disappears
For one of us, the feeling of invisibility had much less to do with appearance and much more to do with work.
After years in a senior NHS role, there was a clear professional identity. A position. A team. Expertise that other people recognised. A place in a system that made sense.
Then that role ended.
Now there is a new business, new work and a professional world that is still being figured out.
And underneath the excitement of starting something new was another feeling:
I do not feel as visible as I did before.
Not because nobody can literally see me. Because one of the structures that used to tell me who I was has gone.
That can happen in all sorts of ways in midlife.
A career changes or ends.
Children need us differently.
A relationship changes.
We stop being somebody’s daughter because a parent dies.
Our body changes.
We move house, retire, become ill, recover from illness or suddenly find ourselves asking what comes next.
There can be a strange gap between an old identity that no longer quite fits and a new one that has not yet taken shape.
No wonder that can feel a bit like disappearing.
The needs underneath being seen
This is where the psychology becomes useful.
In Schema Therapy, we think about core emotional needs. Two that felt particularly relevant in this conversation were the need for autonomy and competence, and the need for secure connection, acceptance and belonging.
If we lose a role that made us feel capable, valued or competent, that can hurt.
If we move into a new phase of life where we are less sure where we fit, that can hurt too.
And the feeling may come out as:
Nobody sees me anymore.
But underneath it there may be something more specific.
I do not feel useful.
I do not feel valued.
I do not know where I belong.
I am not sure who I am here.
I miss being recognised.
That distinction matters, because a vague feeling of invisibility is very difficult to respond to. A need is easier to get curious about.
Midlife and the question of what matters now
There is an old psychological idea that feels surprisingly relevant here.
Erik Erikson described a task of middle adulthood that he called generativity. The word is rather grand, but the idea is much more ordinary.
It is about contributing beyond ourselves.
That might be through raising children, mentoring someone, teaching, creating something, caring for people, supporting a community, passing on knowledge, making art, doing useful work or building something that matters to us.
It does not have to be impressive. It does not have to become a legacy. And it absolutely does not require us to launch a foundation before lunch.
What we liked about the idea was the shift in the question.
Instead of:
Are people seeing me?
we might sometimes ask:
What feels meaningful to me now?
That is not a magic solution to ageism, sexism, financial pressure or the very real experience of being overlooked.
Nor is it an instruction to an exhausted woman doing two jobs and caring for everybody else that she just needs to “find her purpose”. Frankly, she may need an uninterrupted night’s sleep and somebody else to make dinner.
But there can be something powerful in noticing where our sense of worth has been located and whether we want all of it to remain there.
A word about money, access and assumptions
This part of our conversation mattered to us.
It is very easy to talk about midlife reinvention as though everybody has the same room to manoeuvre.
They do not.
The woman who can reduce her hours, buy the books, pay for a trainer, start a business or take six months to work out what she wants next is in a very different position from somebody on a zero hours contract who is worrying about rent, food and childcare.
So we need to be careful with the language of “reinvention” and “purpose”. Sometimes it quietly assumes time, money and choice that not everyone has.
But we also caught ourselves making another assumption: that a difficult or poorly paid role cannot itself provide meaning.
It might.
We do not get to decide from the outside what makes somebody else feel useful, connected or proud.
That is why curiosity matters more than prescription.
What gives my life meaning may not be what gives yours meaning. And neither of us gets to mark the other one’s homework.
And then there is the industry of making women feel unseen
There is another uncomfortable part to all this.
Telling women that they are becoming invisible can be commercially very useful.
If ageing means disappearing, then perhaps we need the cream, the supplement, the treatment, the diet, the procedure, the programme or the subscription that promises to make us visible again.
One of us had only to open Instagram to be presented with a conveyor belt of supposed midlife problems she had apparently failed to notice she had.
This does not mean there is anything wrong with caring about our appearance.
Get Botox if you want Botox.
Buy the cream if you love the cream.
Colour your hair. Do not colour your hair.
The interesting question is the same one we came back to in our Grey Matters conversation:
Is this something I want, or am I being frightened into needing it?
How SOS can show up when we feel invisible
When an old source of visibility or worth is threatened, our SOS responses can kick in.
Submit
We give in to the story.
Maybe I really am irrelevant now.
Maybe nobody wants to hear what I think.
Maybe this is just what happens to women my age.
We shrink ourselves to fit the conclusion.
Opt Out
We withdraw.
We stop putting ourselves forward. Stop going. Stop asking. Stop trying. Perhaps we detach from the uncomfortable feeling altogether because it is easier not to think about it.
Storm In
We try to force visibility back.
We work harder. Achieve more. Fix more. Control more. Become indispensable. Or throw ourselves into changing how we look because doing something feels safer than sitting with uncertainty.
Again, none of these responses makes us ridiculous or dysfunctional.
They are understandable attempts to cope.
The question is whether they are actually giving us what we need.
What might the Lifeguard do?
The Lifeguard does not arrive with a five point plan for becoming a magnificent midlife woman.
Thank God.
It notices the distress signal and gets more specific.
Instead of simply saying “I feel invisible”, it might ask:
Where do I feel invisible?
What has changed?
What did being seen used to give me?
What am I missing now?
Do I need recognition, belonging, competence, connection, rest, reassurance or something else?
What is within my control here, and what genuinely is not?
Sometimes the answer may be to put ourselves forward.
Sometimes it may be to grieve a role we have lost.
Sometimes it may be to ask for more recognition.
Sometimes it may be to stop chasing recognition from a place that is never going to give it.
And sometimes it may be simply to notice what we already do that has worth.
Not in a motivational poster way.
In a very ordinary way.
I care for people.
I know things.
I make somebody laugh.
I do my job well.
I keep a family going.
I create things.
I contribute.
I matter even when nobody is applauding.
Maybe visibility is not the only prize
We ended up somewhere neither of us quite expected.
Perhaps the aim is not to make ourselves permanently visible.
Because being visible can also mean being watched, judged, appraised and evaluated. There can be freedom in becoming less preoccupied with that particular gaze.
That does not mean pretending ageism does not exist. It does not mean women should quietly accept being overlooked at work, in healthcare, in relationships or anywhere else.
It means there may be more than one way to measure whether we matter.
Being seen by other people is lovely.
Being valued matters.
Belonging matters.
Recognition matters.
But perhaps there is also something to be said for becoming a little less dependent on the outside world to tell us who we are.
Not entirely. We are human. We need other people.
Just enough that when one form of visibility changes, we do not have to disappear with it.
A few things to think about
If the idea of becoming invisible resonates, it might be worth getting more specific:
Where in my life do I feel most seen at the moment?
Where do I feel overlooked?
What has changed in the past few years?
What did my old role, appearance or identity give me emotionally?
What need might be sitting underneath the feeling of invisibility?
When I feel unseen, do I tend to Submit, Opt Out or Storm In?
What am I doing already that has meaning or worth, even if nobody is particularly noticing?
And perhaps the biggest one:
If I stopped trying quite so hard to be visible, what might I want to turn towards instead?
More from the “Unstuck Conversation” series
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