I Didn’t Notice Becoming Invisible — Then I Hit Midlife

There’s a scene in my novel, Turn Back Time, when my main character Erica is looking back on life as a midlife woman, now that she’s had the—fictional, I hasten to add—WULT® treatment to make herself look twenty years younger. “Middle-aged women are background noise”, she muses. “Unless you’re in a ‘role’, like being a mother, or doing your job, or you’re famous or something.”

When I was writing Turn Back Time, I became interested in exploring the different things invisibility can mean to us in midlife: whether we notice the moment we disappear, and what—if anything—we choose to do about it.

Spoiler alert: midlife invisibility is not just about that deafening silence from the building site when you walk past, which actually came as a huge relief to me. Like most women, I hated wondering what would be shouted out, and trying to walk normally while knowing that at every step I was being scrutinised. For me, this would usually result in a strange, bow-legged walk akin to a cowboy in one of those stand-offs you see in old westerns.

It’s also more than that day-to-day preference the world has for a younger, attractive woman: it’s what Sam Baker, author of The Shift, describes as the point at which women become “underestimated and ignored”; not because they have less to offer, but because society decides they’re no longer useful.

If it hasn’t happened to you yet, here’s a PSA: you won’t write about it in your diary. Because it’s not the big moment you might think. It creeps in uninvited, some parts welcome, some less so. And you explain it away at first: “I didn’t get served for ages at the bar because the barman was chatting to his friends”... “Nobody let me out at the junction today because I was wearing my old hoodie and had no makeup on”...

Each time, there’s a reasonable explanation, and all the while, undetected, we are fading like Marty does in that photo in Back To The Future. Which I realise is a very Gen X example to use, and dates me somewhat.

Not getting these minor ‘leg-ups’ that you can enjoy as a young woman is liveable. However, stage two of invisibility, which, I warn you, comes hot on the heels of stage one, isn’t just about being overlooked, but about being ignored, discounted and even spoken over.

And yes, you still make excuses to begin with: “They didn’t listen to my point in that meeting because the Zoom was running over and nobody wants that on a Friday”... “The email thread moved on without my input but it was urgent, so I get why”...

This stage is hard to stomach. Because it’s about opinions becoming disposable and authority depleting as fast as collagen levels. Collagen I can stir into my smoothie, but this feels like something that will take generations to change.

As Erica observes in the book, it’s about roles, and visibility is dependent on them. Once your role as an attractive young woman—or, more sepcifically, a fertile young woman—is over, then what do you ‘do’? How do you ‘serve’? Are you a mother? OK then. A carer? Fine. A worker? Check. But if you're just a middle-aged woman and don’t fit neatly into one of those categories, it can truly feel like nobody can see you.

Playing with the idea of having that visibility switched back on in Turn Back Time was fascinating. It’s like a test: what happens when the gradual fade is interrupted? What do we notice? What interested me most wasn’t the novelty of being seen again, but what came next for Erica. Because once you’ve noticed the photograph fade, you know what happens… and you can’t ‘un-know’ it.

As midlifers, mid-youthers, or—and I’m quite comfortable with this moniker—middle-aged women, we might not get to decide how visible we are to the world, but we do get to decide what’s important to us and where we channel our energy.

For many women, that means caring less about being what society expects of us and more about being honest—and about being ourselves. Speaking up. Taking up space. Choosing the people we have around us and not putting up with relationships or friendships that don’t serve us. There’s such a power in this; a lot more power, in fact, than getting let out at a junction, or being served first at the bar.

And I’m here for it.

Turn Back Time by Eleanor Tucker is out now