From the Vault: What It Costs to Wait to Be Seen

I recorded this one a while back, and in it I explore a feeling so many of us have after 40, where you walk into a room and somehow nobody quite registers that you're there. Back then I thought the answer was to be seen again, to be noticed, and that if I could just be visible then the rest would sort itself out. I'd say it a bit differently now.

I've pulled the episode from the vault because the question underneath it still holds up. I talk about the small everyday versions of this and why travel makes all  so hard to ignore.

Here's what I've come to think since. Invisibility isn't really the deepest problem.  While I've left the original episode the way it was,  at the end I come back and add the part I didn't have words for yet, plus a small invitation you can actually try this week.

In this episode:

• Airports and overhead bins
• The chocolate shop in Oman
• When waiting becomes a habit
• Fight, flight, freeze, fawn
• The cost of walking away
• Chosen vs. imposed invisibility
• Becoming visible to yourself first
• What I'd add now

This episode is for you if:

• you've stood clearly next in line and watched someone who arrived after you get helped first
• you travel solo, or you're thinking about it, and you've felt strangely easy to overlook when there's no one beside you
• you're a woman over 40 who's tired of having to remind the world that you're right here
• you've felt that heat rise up in you when you're passed over, and you don't want to have to beg to be seen
• you've wondered whether letting it go keeps the peace, or slowly trains you to abandon yourself

Resources mentioned:

Take the solo travel quiz at https://freedomlookslikethis.com/solo-trip-fit/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I recorded episode 11 sometime back, and in it I talk about invisibility. It's a feeling that so many of us have over 40, where you walk into a room and somehow nobody quite registers that you're there. At the time, I thought that part of the answer was to be seen again, to be noticed. I figure that if I could just be visible, then the rest would sort itself out. But over the last few months, after several solo trips and many conversations with women over 40, I've realized that there's more to the story. Because the women I've watched actually change. They weren't always the boldest ones. And they also weren't the most fearless. But they were the ones who started making small decisions that were true to them again. So I'm replaying this recording and I want you to listen to it a little bit differently this time. You'll hear me talk about invisibility like it's the problem to solve. And I would say it a bit differently now. I don't think invisibility is the deepest problem. I think the deeper one is that we stop choosing ourselves or we stop choosing our needs when we start to feel invisible. And then one day we realize we're really not choosing for ourselves at all. I've left the episode the way it is, how I originally recorded it. And I want to invite you to ask yourself this question as you listen. It's still one of the most important questions I've asked on this show. What does it cost you to wait to be seen? Think about that as you listen. This is one of the few replays I'll be pulling from the vault over the next two months. When this one's done, I'll share with you some of the things that I know now that I didn't quite put into words back then. Most women think solo travel is about being brave or fearless. But it's really about letting go of expectations holding you in place. This show is about what changes when you stop waiting and take yourself seriously. Starting with intentional travel. I'm Demi Ann, and this is Freedom Looks Like This. Let's get started. This is an episode I've been circling for a while. Partly because I wasn't sure how to talk about it without oversimplifying it, and partly because I'm still living it. It's the experience a lot of women have at some point after 40, where you start noticing that you're not being seen in the same way as you once were. I've heard women like me say something like, I feel invisible. When we say that, we're not referring to some big, obvious moment, but rather to many small, everyday interactions that start to add up. For example, it shows up sometimes when I'm waiting for something or for someone, like to be helped or to get a response. I'll be standing there clearly next in line, fully present, and someone else will get helped first. Sometimes it's a younger woman, sometimes it's a man. Usually it's someone who arrived after me. Nothing catastrophic happens in those moments, but they do rub me the wrong way. And once I started noticing it, I couldn't stop. Where this often happens is, for example, in airpods. You know those moments when people are settling in and someone needs help lifting a bag into the overhead bin? I've watched a man help the cute young woman in front of me with her bag and then completely ignore me, even though I'm right there dealing with my own luggage that's just as heavy. Well, it looks as heavy. I don't think every man should help me lift my bag. That's not the point. But the point is the contrast, the ease with which some women are noticed and responded to, and how easily others are passed over. What surprised me is how furious I sometimes get in these moments. I don't tend to explode, but I do feel the heat rise up in me. Because I don't want to have to beg to be seen. I don't want to have to perform for attention. Nor do I want to shrink myself or make it easier for someone to overlook me or for someone to feel comfortable in that space. What comes up for me instead is this very clear internal response. I'm right here. Look at me. This space that I take, I belong here. I've been paying attention to how I respond in these circumstances because I don't think there is one correct response. For me, I usually step forward. I struggle with how to do that in a way that feels expensive and respectful to myself because I don't want to be aggressive. I don't want to be rude. But at the same time, I never want to be the retiring wallflower, quietly accepted crumbs instead of the whole serving. People say, you want to have your cake and eat it too. And I'm like, of course. Does it even make sense to have one without the other? What's the point of getting the cake if I won't eat it? Sometimes stepping forward is very simple. If someone tries to cut the line, I might say, the back of the line is over there. In less generous moments, I've said something like, Am I invisible? People don't always know what to do with that. Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they look confused, or they just ignore me. But it tells me something about where I am emotionally when this is what I choose to say. Because it means I'm at a point where I feel myself disappearing and I want to be seen. There was a moment last year in Oman that made this very clear to me. I was willing to buy chocolates. You know, those fancy chocolates, Dubai chocolate that comes in a gold wrapper. And I wanted to bring them as gifts to some friends back home. So I stood there for a while and no one acknowledged me. Then another woman walked in and someone came up immediately to serve her. Now I could have told myself lots of stories about why. For example, maybe she's a regular. Maybe they knew her. It could be her 20th time and she spends a lot of money every time. It doesn't really matter. I often think in those situations, maybe I don't understand how things work here. But the fact is that I was waiting. And I was there first. So I stepped up and I said, I've been waiting before she even arrived. Is anyone going to serve me? I wasn't asking for special treatments. I was asking for ordinary service. The moment didn't just solve the immediate problem, but it gave me a sense of self-esteem. Or rather, it validated the self-esteem I already had. It reminded me that I can trust myself to be consistent, and that consistency does matter to me in how I behave, how I show up. At the same time, I want to be honest about something else. This is also tiring. It's tiring to have to do it over and over again, to keep reminding the world that you're here. And sometimes I just let it go. Sometimes I decide it's not worth my energy that day. It's something I'm still navigating. I think part of what makes this complicated is that invisibility isn't always personal. Sometimes it's structural. Sometimes it's about power. It could be all about how the space is organized and who that space is designed to respond to quickly. And whether it's harder or easier depends on the impact it has on me over time. So if I accept being invisible in this situation, what does that mean for me later? Does it make my life easier? Or does it slowly train me to abandon myself? This is where I think the idea of the invisible woman becomes misleading. The story we often give is that women become invisible because they've aged out of relevance or desirability. Sure, that happens and we don't get to control it. But what I also see is that many women have learned to wait. We wait to be invited or to be chosen. We wait for approval or acknowledgement. Waiting becomes a habit, a posture of the way we show up in the world. And over time, it teaches us that crumbs are okay. Travel has been one of the places where this pattern becomes impossible for me to ignore. When you travel alone, you're constantly in situations where waiting isn't neutral. Airports, hotels, restaurants, public transport, shops. You're visible simply by being there. And at the same time, it's strangely easy to overlook because you are alone without a rule attached to you. It's kind of this tension there, right? There's no partner beside you, no family groupings, no social signals or friends to explain who you are or what you're doing there. I so clearly remember in Hanoi being asked by a group of people, don't you have friends? Oh, because they saw me traveling alone. The thing is that travel disrupts waiting because it forces decisions. You have to decide where you're going, how you're getting there, whether you'll speak up, whether you'll stay or leave. There are all of these small decisions that you get to make all the time. I've had moments during travel where I felt insecure and didn't know what to do. And it was still on me to decide. Sometimes it's small, like do I get on this bus if I missed the one before and I'm not sure if it will go exactly the same route. Sometimes it's bigger. Like, do I stay in a restaurant when I feel invisible or when I feel exposed? That restaurant example is one that has happened to me a lot because I've tried walking away sometimes if something doesn't feel right about the experience. But what happened after I did that several times is that I noticed my world got smaller. The spaces that I was willing to enter shrunk. And what happened is I became more invisible, not less. So instead, I've been practicing staying, taking up space. I let myself be seen even when it feels uncomfortable. Now I also want to talk about the other part of invisibility. Think about Harry Potter and the invisibility cloak, for example. It's powerful, right? Invisibility isn't always negative. There have been times in my travels where a certain type of invisibility has been helpful to me. As a Western woman in some places, I was able to move in ways that local women couldn't. I could attend events or travel to certain areas, or be present in spaces that were largely male in Sudan, for example, without drawing attention in the same way that I would if I was a local woman. In places like Japan, where I've had people point at me in small towns, especially in rest stops on the highway outside of big cities, I'm actually okay with being invisible. I've heard other black people talk about being stared at, but then avoided for eye contact. And I've wondered, is it worse to stare or to avoid eye contact once you've been caught staring? These things are culturally specific and they don't all land the same way. They don't all mean the same thing. For me, one of the things that makes a difference is choice. Choice and invisibility doesn't erode my sense of self. But imposed invisibility does. When I choose to step back, it feels different than when someone else decides to erase me, if someone else decides to ignore me. That distinction has helped me understand which moments are worth responding to and which ones I can let pass. When someone triggers that familiar feeling of being overlooked, I think about the next opportunity. Because the choice I make today affects the choice I make tomorrow. And each of those choices affects the person that I become. If I shrink today, it's easier for me to shrink tomorrow. If I speak today, then it's easier for me to speak up tomorrow. So really the thing is that each choice accumulates. When I started paying closer attention to these moments, I realized that how I respond when I feel invisible matters just as much as what actually happened. Over time I could see patterns, not just in myself, but in the women I talk to and work with. So what's your pattern? What comes naturally to you, and what responses have you learned or developed over time? We tend to talk about fight, flight, freeze, and fun as reactions to danger. But they also show up clearly in moments of invisibility. Each one affects how visible you feel, not just to others, but also to yourself. For me, it's usually fight. I speak up, I speak out, I hold my ground even when I'm quivering inside. That response reduces invisibility externally. People hear me. They respond. Sometimes there's a shift in the energy or in the room, but it does cost me. It costs my own energy and it takes a certain amount of vigilance. And as I mentioned before, it can be exhausting to always be the one who steps forward. Freeze shows up differently. Nothing moves outward, but internally there is a lot happening, possibly confusion, tension. Maybe you're feeling self-doubt, and when you freeze, it increases your invisibility because the world doesn't get any signal that something is happening inside of you. Over time, that can teach your body that disappearing is safer than being present. What I've learned is that visibility doesn't have to start with speaking. It can start with movement, shifting your weight, standing a little bit straighter, giving yourself a moment instead of forcing a response, taking a breath. Now fawn can look like visibility, but it's conditional. You're seen as long as you're agreeable, pleasant, accommodating, inviting. The cost of that is internal invisibility. Your needs don't make it into the room. Over time you may feel seen, but not known. With fawn, becoming more visible doesn't mean confrontation, but rather it could just mean pausing before you agree. Let the silence stretch. Allow mild discomfort instead of smoothing it over immediately. And then there's flight. That looks like leaving or withdrawing. This could mean you decide you don't want to deal with it. And it could feel like relief in the moment. But the thing is that when you repeatedly fly away, when you practice flight repeatedly, it shrinks your world. The more you leave, the fewer places you have available to you. Now I want to emphasize that none of these responses are wrong. They all make sense in context. What matters is noticing which one you practice most often, and what is it teaching you over time about your place in the world. Travel makes these patterns obvious because you don't have your usual buffers. At home, you know how things work. Travel strips that away and shows you how you actually respond when you don't have familiarity to lean on. And that's where visibility to yourself starts to matter more than visibility to others. What I'm talking about here is the kind of invisibility that slowly teaches you to abandon yourself. That's the one that I refuse. When I feel myself shrinking, I ground myself. I try to feel what's happening. I try to remember who am I? I stand a straighter. Maybe my gaze is more direct, and I even step forward. My goal isn't to intimidate, but it's to make it impossible not to notice that I'm here. This isn't easy. Sometimes I'm tired, sometimes I'm insecure. Sometimes I really don't know what to do. But I keep coming back to this. Invisibility doesn't end when other people notice you. It ends when you start taking yourself seriously. Travel has helped me practice this because it puts me front and center in my own life. There's no one else to defer to, no one else to decide for me. Even when I'm unsure or tired, I'm still the one who has to choose. And that repetition, it builds a something. It's not about bravery, once again, or confidence. It's not just personality traits, but being familiar with myself lets me know that I'm someone who can stay present. So that's the episode. Now let me come back and tell you what I've realized now that I didn't talk about when I first recorded it. When I first recorded this episode, I really did think that visibility was the goal. I thought if I could just be seen, really seen, then everything else would fall into place. Now I think that visibility is kind of a byproduct. The harder work is choosing yourself before anybody else notices, and honestly, long before anybody else decides to clap for you. In this episode, I talk about travel as sometimes being a way to escape. Travel was never really the escape for me, but it was a big part of the practice. When I think about it, every solo trip is really just a stack of small choices that you get to make for yourself. Where you're going to eat, what you're going to skip, where are you going to walk? What will you see? And when you're somewhere where nobody knows you and nobody has an opinion about what you should be doing, you start to hear what you actually want again. And then you get to bring that home with you, all of the lessons that you learned from that. That's really why so much of what I teach now is about intentional solo travel. It's not because a trip magically fixes anything, but it's because a trip hands you the same small lesson over and over again until it becomes second nature. You can choose, you can trust yourself. And you start to tell the difference between what you actually want and what you were just going along with all along. So looking back, I still think that this episode was asking the right question. But what I want to add now is also the method. Waiting to be seen has a cost, and the cost is all of those small choices you stop making for yourself while you wait. So here's my invitation for you this week. Think of one small thing that you've handed over to somebody else that you consistently hand over to somebody else. Maybe you always let the other person choose what restaurant you go to, even though you might have some interest. Or you always let them make the plan for the weekend because you know that they have a strong personality. It could be something really small. And then take that thing back for yourself. Choose it yourself this week out loud, on purpose. So, in short, the invitation this week is for you to make one choice yourself. And if you want to level up, notice how it feels to do that. Notice whether it feels a bit uncomfortable, and then go ahead and do it anyway. If you want some help in where you've been waiting for permission, I made a quiz that does exactly that. It's quick and it'll show you the part of yourself you might have slowly stopped choosing. And the link is in the show notes.