It is not only that people do not see you.

It is that, over time, being unseen starts to make you doubt your own solidity, your own right to take up space.

You become an apology for existing.

You learn to make yourself small, to absorb slights without reacting, to accept that your time and your dignity and even your money are somehow worth less than other people’s, because everyone around you seems to treat them that way and it is exhausting to keep insisting otherwise.

I did not realize, in those years, how much of that I had internalized, how thoroughly I had come to accept my own invisibility as simply the natural order of things.