They had simply kept the basic human habit of seeing.

And when I finally had power of my own, that was the thing I most wanted to build into everything I touched: a refusal to let anyone blur into the background, a stubborn insistence on seeing the people the world is designed to overlook.

And then there are the others.

The ones who never once look at your face.

The ones who speak to you as though you are a vending machine that has inconveniently developed the power of speech, who snap their fingers, who let their eyes slide right past you as if the uniform makes you disappear.

You learn, in this work, exactly how it feels to be treated as invisible, to stand two feet from a person and be less real to them than the centerpiece on their table.