Invisible

I found myself in the examining room of an ophthalmologist, waiting. I accompanied my partner Dan to the inner realm, beyond the hospital’s outer waiting room to help calm his agitated mind. A few years back, he had a detached retina in the right eye, and now he was not only seeing floaters in the left, but also flashing lights. So he made this urgent appointment at Oakland Kaiser.

The nurse told me to sit in one chair in a corner of this small room, in back of the heavy metal equipment, while she fired questions at Dan, and then as she left, she said the doctor would probably want me in the other chair, so she asked me to sit there, next to the counter with all its instruments, package of plastic gloves, and phone in its cradle. I made sure to back the chair up to the wall and tucked my legs under it so I wouldn’t take up too much room, because the door, as the nurse left, swung right up to the chair.

Dan and I passed the time making observations about the equipment—how little it had probably changed over time. I had worn glasses since the second grade, while he had only known this world of eye care since his retinal surgery, where they first put a “bubble” in his eye, and when that didn’t work, put in a “buckle” to keep the retina attached. Since then he needed to wear glasses. The equipment may have seemed more exotic in its newness to him, but to me, it was all part of my everyday life with glasses for most of those years and contacts for eight of them.

The doctor came in, his white coats whisking past my knees.

“Mr. Dickinson?” He shook Dan’s hand.

I waited for my turn. Would he call me Mrs. Dickinson or ask my name?

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” he continued to Dan, facing him, his back to me. More firing away of questions. How long had the floaters occurred. Did he touch his eye area when the flashing took place.

“Dr. Lewis didn’t ask me that,” Dan said, referring to the doctor who did his retinal surgeries at Santa Clara Kaiser. “Is that important, whether I touched my eye or not when that happens?” Dan clearly felt this was significant.

“I don’t know. But I’m going to examine you. These drops will make your vision blurry while I look at your eyes through this magnifier. Then I’ll insert the drops to dialate your eyes. Okay?”

Dan agreed. What else could he do? I wondered how much longer it would be before the doctor acknowledged me, as I continued to sit there silently. I started back in on the New Yorker magazine article, not to become absorbed, but to distract myself. I was here in this room, yet I was not here. My presence felt ambiguous. What was my role? I had come to support Dan, was a witness to the process, to the doctor’s explanation of his procedure, and to Dan’s future.

We had gone through Dan’s diagnosis of cancer two years earlier, along with the research, surgery, and treatment, and when I had offered to accompany him to this appointment, he had agreed. I was happy to support him emotionally. It was not only the retinal detachment before I knew him, but also the cancer, which raised his anxiety about being in a hospital, let alone visiting a doctor.

Then the doctor flicked the lights off. I put the magazine back in my bag.

My own eye doctors, doing a regular eye exam, had never completely darkened the room. All I could do now was sit there in the dark while the doctor carefully manipulated the machine, turning a lever a tiny bit to look more closely at Dan’s eye. The outline of Dan’s shoulders were crisp from the doctor’s pin-sized light, and his eyes shiny. The doctor’s chin and nose shone too, but not his eyes or beyond. I was invisible. Unacknowledged.

When I was little, it was important to be good, or go unnoticed. My brother’s behavior demanded a lot of attention from our parents, and arguing and yelling often caused me to hide in my room, a sanctuary. I learned to be invisible because I didn’t want to get in the pathway of conflict any more than I had to. I had a way of manipulating my brother so that he would get into trouble and I would look innocent. I was anything but innocuous, fully participating in the tension that ensured after I gave him a seering look which caused him to beat my legs to bruises. In the car, we sat on the back seat together on long Sunday drives, or on journeys in summer to one campground after another in one of my mother’s well-planned vacations.

Learning not to be noticed extended to school, where, as an introvert, I said little, did what I was told, and tried not to stand out. One of the only times I drew attention to myself was a reminder not to. I got caught, along with a few boys, for playing during Mr. Pang’s sixth grade class. We sat in the back row. One of them demonstrated how we could make a racing car out of an eraser with staples attached to the bottom like wheels. The cars slid back and forth along the desks pushed tightly together.

When Mr. Pang finally noticed, his dark eyes pierced through me. I went stiff. The class stopped talking completely. All eyes were on us. I can tell you what I was wearing and the punishment, but I can’t tell you what the teacher said, what any of us said in response, if anything.

As punishment, we were required to stay in at recess for one week and read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. That doesn’t sound like much, but when your friends are outside in the air, out of the classroom, every word stings. I wore light orange colored brushed cotton pants and a purple zipped-front long-sleeved ribbed top with a large O-ring at the end of the zipper, zipped up to my neck. How can one remember the worst incident, but nothing about it? My cloak of invisibility dropped—I was the center of attention, the one thing I had tried to avoid.

A technique that is well-worn, used for a couple decades, will not wear out. It becomes unconscious, like a daily routine of eating particular meals, brushing teeth, washing the face. You don’t even know you are wearing it. At some point, it became not preferable to always be invisible, and I started clamoring, in the form of wanting to be recognized for achievement. It took a long way to want that and sometimes take down the cloak.

In my 30s, when I became the children’s book buyer at a bookstore, I was the person customers came to for advice and expertise. I consulted with the publisher reps. Staff sought me out too. For a short time I was even assistant manager. It felt comfortable, since I had taken on more responsibility incrementally. I worked closely with a manager who had deep psychological issues, however, and she hounded me out of the position on invented charges, even claiming I had prior warnings, I took it as a warning to not be too much in the limelight.

More recently, in my career as a community college teacher, I find a strange mixture of high profile and invisibility. Up in front of thirty students in a classroom, all eyes focus on me, I exist fully and completely. I cannot hide. I prepare well, have my lesson plan which serves as a script for the session. I play a role which feels unatural. Fortunately, my last semester in graduate school I took a play writing workshop, which included each student acting in each other’s plays, so I learned how to put on an external layer. This kept me in good stead as a new teacher, yet every class felt like doing yet another presentation, a big deal. I shook before going in, but no one could tell. It took a couple of years to get past the nervousness, but it still didn’t feel natural, until another year into it. I was a gatekeeper to the students taking a required English composition class. To them I was anything but invisible, and not introverted. I embraced the role and learned to have fun with it. Gradually, it has felt more natural.

Outside of the classroom, in school as a professional to other professionals, it’s a different story. Riding the elevator in the administration building which holds various departmental offices and higher ups, I see people who I have been introduced to multiple times. When they do not acknowledge me, I change from a teacher who matters and is present in the lives of her students, to a person who does not exist—the invisible one. Defeated, I exit on my floor and head to the office I share with other adjunct, or part-time, faculty, where I belong as part of this group. Being unseen is common for adjuncts, generally. Literally, we are not present as much as full time teachers, and we don’t have the same benefits.

Adjuncts often have to take classes at times when most other faculty are not there because they don’t want it, or because many adjuncts work in more than one district, driving from place to place. Part timers are less involved in planning and assessment committees, they do not meet with staff on college issues unless they can fit it into their schedule, and are not properly compensated for any of this. In other words, we do not lead high-profile college lives. Adjuncts have a hard time making contact with full time faculty, staff, and administrators. Combine that with a tendency towards invisibility, and you have a recipe for not being acknowledged.

High profile work, then, would suggest garnering recognition. Yet in spite of co-coordinating a special program on campus, I did not yield nods on the elevator. I worked with students in this program for three semesters, holding events where other staff were invited. What matters is that the work challenged me—not in organizational ways, which are my forte, but in terms of interfacing with people beyond my level of comfortability, and in situations outside the classroom. It was like giving a party where you were a co-host. My co-coordinator, the counselor, would lead these events, introducing people, making the opening statement, and we would arrange for my part, what I would say to a room full of people, either taking some of what she would normally say or mixing it with something I came up with myself, such as explaining students’ writing in my English class component and having the students read examples from a compilation I put together. I shook hands of people who later ignored me outside this setting, including one administrator who, when I recently appeared at his desk to retrieve an add form for a student, told me “It’s nice to meet you,” even though he had participated many times in our events, had spoken on a panel we arranged, and when I rode the elevator with my co-coordinator that semester, he had greeted me warmly.

My co-coordinator, chatty and gregarious, had no such problems with recognition, partly because she had worked at the college for twenty years in another guise prior to retraining herself and becoming a counselor, and knew everyone, but partly too, because she would go up to people, put their two hands in hers or hug them, and offer her wide smile, opening herself up to them.

She wanted to be seen, wanted to engage with people as it gave her energy. For me, as an introvert, this drained me. But now I had this problem where I didn’t want to be seen and I did want to be seen at the same time, and it happened quite suddenly. It was important to be seen because I, too, needed to network, get support for the program, get people to mentor the students in it (part of how the program worked), and it was required of my job to participate, at least in some way, in public.

I wanted credit for the work I was doing, and wanted to open up possibilities for the future. Talking with the counselor had opened my eyes to that. I wanted my career to grow and become more secure, whichever direction that would go. How could I do that if I didn’t exist to others? The girl in me was fighting against this new calling to stand up and take off cloak. Be seen and heard. When you discover you have a voice, when you have something valuable to say, you want others to sit up and take notice.

I wondered why the doctor did not speak to me, let alone glance my way. The nurse had recognized me. If Dan had introduced me—“This is my wife Laurel—is it okay if she sits in with us?”—the doctor would have had to see me. Or if I had said something, he couldn’t ignore me. Dan was preoccupied with his own possibly serious health issue. The nurse had paved the way, creating an expectation that the doctor would say something to me about the chair I was in, whether or not that was satisfactory. I was waiting. He might have wanted me to move to the other chair, or he might have commented that I was fine sitting in the one by the counter. I could have initiated a comment about this myself. My partner in the college program would have said something.

The doctor had his own professional behavior. His confidence, knowledge, and explanations to Dan were informative and helpful. He assuaged Dan’s concerns and had him make an appointment with a retinal specialist. His behavior did not extend outside that realm. He did not know what to do if a significant other or friend came into the examination room, or perhaps this was what he felt comfortable with, what he came up with as his solution. He did not seem to think it strange for someone to witness his consultation in the dark space. In that little room I struggled. It never even occurred to me to speak up.

The doctor turned the light back on in the little room. Then he shook Dan’s hand. Without looking my way , he left the room. I put my bag on my shoulder, got up, and walked out with Dan to the bright hallway.