It should come as no surprise to me that I often appear to be invisible. For years I tried to hide myself from view by presenting a bland and quietly reserved emanation. My superpower was the ability to present myself as a translucent blob to the world. All I really wanted to do was crawl into a hole and be left alone with my books. I suppose there are a lot of reasons but not feeling worthy of love is probably the foundation of my ability to be lost to view.

As much as I shunned the spotlight, I was still always deeply hurt when not acknowledged. At times I felt like people, while scanning a crowd, would somehow magically skip over me as if there was a hiccup in their eyeballs, at precisely the right moment, that made them overlook me. 

At the same time, whenever I got some desperately needed accolade my heart would race and my eardrums would pulsate so all I could hear was a whooshing sound that overrode any positive comment that was made to me. 

My ‘life-before’ was not that I wanted to be alone… it’s that I wanted to be left alone.