'All about the title' - part II

In my last post, I started explaining why I called this blog “Retirement in the Mix: Resisting ‘Gone.’” That post explained the “maze and the mix.” This time, I’ll try to make sense of the “Resisting ‘gone’” part.

On resisting being “gone”:

Over the years, it has become way too clear to me that being “invisible” is a big issue for me. I’m sure it stems from my childhood (to borrow an old phrase). But I really would like to have gotten over it by now. I haven’t.

Of course I don’t mean actually invisible. And I don’t mean unrecognized in the sense of insufficiently honored or respected or applauded. I mean feeling irrelevant, unnoticed, ignored, dismissed, trivialized, not seen. I mean those moments that we’ve all had when the conversation goes on as if we weren’t there. When our comments make not a ripple in the content or direction of what others say. When people walking toward us make no adjustment to avoid a collision, leaving the task entirely to us. When someone greets the person standing with us, but not us. When the wait staff ignores our table and serves later arrivals before us. When we are speaking and someone else talks over us, as if what we’re saying is not important enough for them to let us finish before they take their turn. Those moments, in short, when it seems that, to others, we might as well not even be there. We’ve all had those moments. They may cause irritation or disappointment for any of us. For me, they are also a source of deep sadness and loneliness.

So, given this issue with invisibility, retirement raised a real challenge. As a professor, of course, I had been able to command visibility: “Listen to me, hear me, your grade depends on it.” Fortunately, teaching wasn’t only a stage. I loved it and seemed to be good at it, and it was a perfect career for me in many ways—an opportunity to keep learning and call it “work,” a chance to do something that felt worthwhile, a way to feel competent . When I retired, I lost all those things, including the audience I had so easily counted on for 30 years. I lost the students who had filled my classes, many taking every course I taught. I lost their visits between classes and their rave evaluations. A similar thing happened as I withdrew from other professional activities. In this case, I no longer had a presence before my peers. Gone the publications, the conference presentations, the public talks. Invisibility loomed—if a sense of absence can be said to “loom.” Yikes! I hadn’t planned on this!

On top of that, retirement brought its own kind of invisibility: being old and being irrelevant. Hard enough for any of us to manage, and made harder by this invisibility thing of mine. Plus, the triple whammy: I am old, I am woman, and I am a lesbian. I belong to a group of folks who are generally quite invisible in this society. It’s a familiar story: women don’t matter as much as men (despite decades of feminist progress). Old people don’t matter as much as younger people. In fact, old people pretty much don’t matter at all. And old, non-heterosexual people are not even part of the conversation. That places old lesbians firmly among the very unimportant, the VUPs.

Snapshots of the invisibility of old women: Wait staff in restaurants and clerks in stores call me “honey.” This is obviously not because we have an intimate relationship. Instead, it’s because I am fair game for trivialization of the sort that comes with a patronizing, even infantilizing tone: “Can I help you, honey?” “There you go, sweetie.” And in case the irrelevance of my actual experience of such treatment isn’t obvious enough, they genuinely believe that they are being kind and that I’ll appreciate it. On the upside of this invisibility, I can do about anything I want to do because no one will “see” me enough to notice, or certainly to care.

My invisibility as a lesbian is more familiar, since that’s pretty much been true all my life. But now it takes on another face: I am invisible as an LGBTQ person in the broader world (that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer—I’m guessing I’ll use this acronym a lot). And  I am invisible as an old member of the LGBTQ community. Everywhere I go, I encounter the assumption that everyone, especially everyone old, is heterosexual. (“What does your husband do?” “Do your children live near you?”) And wherever I look in the LGBTQ community, I find the assumption that there are no old LGBTQ people—least of all lesbians! (Check out the LGBTQ magazines, where you will see approximately zero old LGBTQ people featured.)

So, another thing I hadn’t imagined about retirement was the specter of this profound sense of irrelevance and invisibility. The sense that I am, simply, gone. This is a familiar place for me to be, but not, shall I say, the healthiest. So, one theme of my retirement has been a commitment to resisting the invisibility that “they” (whoever that is) expect of me. That’s also one major reason for writing this blog. Rather than disappear, rather than be “gone,” I plan to have a voice, to remain in the mix, to keep stirring the pot. Hence, “resisting ‘gone’.”

So that’s the naming story. And now, I want to get on with blogging about it all, staying in the mix, resisting “gone”—and inviting you all to join in the discussion of how we all do this.