Showing Up Anyway -- How I Stopped Feeling Invisible After 50

I can walk to the neighborhood pool on a sunny afternoon, find men sunbathing and swimming, and not one of them will look up.

Not one glance at the fat old lady in the blue swimsuit.

And here’s the thing about that. The feelings that show up are not the ones you’d expect. There’s relief, because I’m an introvert and being unnoticed is genuinely comfortable. There’s humor, because I see myself clearly and the whole situation is kind of funny. And underneath all of that, if I’m being completely real, there’s a small flicker of something else. Not vanity exactly. Just the very human awareness that at some point, without really noticing when, I became someone people look past.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. What it means to feel invisible. And what it means to show up anyway.

I’ve Felt This Way My Whole Life

Contents

Here’s something I don’t say out loud very often. I have always felt fat. Even when I wasn’t. Even when I look back at old photos and think, dude, you were actually fine, I didn’t feel it then. I felt wrong in my body for most of my life.

Advertising. Movies. Friends who were smaller. Health standards that felt impossible. All of it stacking up into a feeling that I never quite looked okay.

Then came the things that actually changed my body. Tamoxifen after cancer treatment. Thyroid medication. Decades of living. The body I have now is not the body I had at thirty and it is not going to be again.

So when nobody looks at the pool, it’s easy to say it’s because I’m fat. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s because I’m older. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither and people are just absorbed in their own lives.

Probably that last one.

The Woman With the Guitar

I want to tell you about a moment that has stayed with me for years.

When I was younger my sister and I attended a weekly bible study group. I brought my guitar every single week. I played and we sang. I was a regular. A known quantity. The person with the guitar.

One week after the study ended, a woman came up to me and asked if this was my first time attending.

I looked at her. I said no, it’s not my first time. And I kind of rolled my eyes because, dude. I’m the one with the guitar. How do you not know me?

It was funny. It also stung a little. Not because I needed her approval but because it was a reminder of something I already knew. It’s surprisingly easy to be completely unseen even in a room full of people who should know you.

That feeling doesn’t go away when you get older. It just changes shape.

What Cancer Did to My Body

I want to be real with you about something because I think it matters for this conversation.

In 2017 I had a mastectomy. Left side. The breast that had been trying to kill me for a year was removed and an expander was put in its place. Then later an implant.

Here is what I actually look like now. The implant sits up high on my chest, not where a natural breast would hang. My right side was reduced to try to match. The scars are there, a long scar across my left side and an anchor scar on my right, a long one underneath, and a scar going upward, and another scar around the remaining nipple which now points in a direction it didn’t used to point. My husband doesn’t care about any of this. I don’t love it. Both of those things are true.

And for the years of treatment before and after that surgery, my body belonged to everyone but me. Mammogram technicians pulling and squishing. Ultrasound technicians. Biopsy needles. Surgeons. Nurses changing bandages. Paper gowns that give you the feeling of being covered when really it’s just a paper towel over your one remaining nipple.

I had no say in who looked. No choice about who touched or examined or adjusted. My body was a medical object for a very long time.

So when I tell you that I now choose to show up in that body on my own terms everywhere I am. At the pool, on camera, in a swimsuit at Aquatica surrounded by people half my age with stunning bodies, you understand what I mean by choosing.

Feeling Invisible after 50: The Gray Hair Decision

Somewhere in all of that, something shifted.

Chemo took my hair. When it grew back it came in gray. Completely gray, with a little pepper running through the top and back. Silver, really. I tried coloring it a few times out of habit. Tried a few different shades. Hated every single one. So I shaved it back down and decided to let it grow the way it wanted to.

That was the right call. I love my gray hair. It suits me in a way the colored versions never did.

I didn’t plan for that to be a turning point. But it was. Something about choosing to look exactly like what I am, a woman in her 60s who has been through some things, felt more like myself than any box of hair color ever had.

The Swim Video

I make product review videos. It’s part of how I earn income and it means putting my face and my body on camera regularly.

A while back I was reviewing a swim pull buoy which is a device you put between your legs to keep them afloat while you focus on your arm stroke. To show the product in use, I needed to film myself swimming. Which meant filming myself from behind in a swimsuit.

I hesitated for about thirty seconds. Then I thought, how do you show a product between someone’s legs without showing their butt? You can’t. So I put a giant sunglasses emoji over my butt, dropped the Tijuana Taxi song underneath it, and published the video. The horn honked at the exact moment the emoji appeared.

It got a great response.

And here’s what I realized in the editing: I wasn’t embarrassed. I was having fun. My body, my butt, my gray hair, my scars, all of it, it’s just me doing a thing I enjoy and sharing it with people who might find it useful or funny or both.

Nobody was going to be embarrassed for me if I wasn’t embarrassed for myself.

What I Want You to Know

Here is what I have figured out, slowly and imperfectly, over the last several years.

Your looks are fleeting. You will get older. You may gain weight. You may end up with a boob that doesn’t match or a scar you didn’t ask for or gray hair you didn’t plan on. Everyone is so worried about how they look and what others think that they forget something important, and that is, the others are thinking about themselves far more than they are thinking about you.

So why not enjoy whatever body you have right now?

If you can move, go do things you love. Go to the pool. Go to the water park. Book the trip. Put on the swimsuit. Film the video.

The most fun I have now is going to Aquatica with my sister. There are young men and women everywhere with bodies that are genuinely stunning in a bathing suit. And my fat self cannot get into that water fast enough.

I have been through a lot. I want to enjoy my life. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

You’re allowed to enjoy yours too. Exactly as you are. Right now. Not twenty pounds from now. Not after the surgery heals or the scars fade or the hair grows back.

Now.

Show up anyway.

Want to read more about my story and experiences? Go check out how I Rebuilt Motivation After 50 When My Spark Was Gone.