Unseen

On the moments nobody sees and what we do with them

I am slowly writing a story about unseen things, the objects, people and places who drop out of our sight and remembrance, maybe because we hide from them and lock the mental door tight, but maybe more often because we just stop looking at them, like they’re clothes left on the floor. In my urban kingdom of cramped, closed houses, veiled windows, high walls, high fences, it all feels very real and relevant. But then that’s why I’m writing it. I think maybe it’s a story I am well-positioned to tell.

My mobility scooter is ailing and so I have been taking short, slow walks up the street and back again, just a very little way, pushing at my wheeled, red walker. I often don’t see a soul. Most people are at work or school. Those I do see are obscured by the glare of the glass of the cars they pass in. Others cross at a distance, worn and separate-looking. Blurred mothers pushing rickety pushchairs disappear quickly through narrow terrace doorways, their babies wailing. Other people, I only hear – the slam of a car boot, a sudden, distant, never-to-be-explained shout of anger or frustration or distress, a pressure-cooker release from someone, somewhere close but concealed. Behind the thick beech hedge of the day centre, people with complex learning difficulties pace the yard making sounds I love much better, sounds like birds, but I catch only glimpses of them through the leaves. Machinery wielded by shadows whines in warehouses a street or two over. My quiet, unbalanced feet scuff the pavement. My time outside is short and soon I am inside again and as hidden as the rest of them. 

When you live without another adult present and work for yourself, the unseen nature of your activities can feel surreal, dreamlike. I am entirely unobserved for great stretches of time. There is the depressing sense sometimes that because what I do is not seen, it doesn’t actually count. I find myself easily discounting it, as if without the gaze of another person I lose some ability to quantify what I’m doing. Was it enough? Was I alright? Have I earned my place in the world today? I long for someone to give me the answer and often worry the answer is no.

More terrifying is the blissful, dry-mouthed knowing that I COULD do nothing at all and no-one would ever know. Oh a reckoning would come in the end, of course it would, one of financial ruin and collapse, but until then I could create the perfect illusion. In the brief times I am seen, I could make it look as if I had it all together, entirely abandoning it all for numbness and avoidance when I’m hidden again. 

I don’t though, or at least not for long, not for more than a day or two. It always amazes me that I don’t, that I have in me this sort of in-built defence against total self-destruction. Thank god for that prim, rigid, righteous side of me that even on my worst days drags me up. Because there is an observer: it’s me. 

Right now, I am grateful for my self-consciousness, choosing the most beautiful interpretation of that phrase. I am grateful for my fundamental desire to see rightness, goodness, beauty, because it means I end up making it myself, even if it’s only in the small moments of my day. I am grateful that I care what I do, because I really do. Because of it, meaning rushes back in to fill all the hidden times and spaces that nobody else sees and even though, often, I feel that I fall woefully short, I still keep trying. I let it matter. It has to matter, I think, else I will soon be lost.

Sometimes I feel such a relief that I am unseen. I feel lucky to have the privilege and privacy to fail quietly and often without judgement. Other times, I find myself longing for affirmation, reassurance. What would I make visible if I could? What do I wish you could see? The answers that come are not particularly grand, not something I could photograph or boast of. I wish you could see the way I duck carefully under the spiders’ webs in the garden and the way I talk to the things around me. I wish you could see the times I sit to meditate with my eyes hot, a lump in my chest and my body a storm, because those are the times I feel most courageous; wish you could see my commitment to opening my heart and allowing everything to be exactly as it is rather than trying to control everything and everyone. I wish you could see my internal battle with anxiety. I wish you could see my mothering because I think, out of everything, that I am very good at that.

These are the moments I wish I could see in other people too. I wish I could lift the lids and shutters of the buildings around me and see the small acts of goodness, bravery and resolve that I know are happening everywhere. I wish I could see the moment someone sighs and heaves themselves up from the sofa to do the washing up. When someone else says, “of course I will help” and then does so, with all their love and attention. I wish I could see us do all the hard, invisible things, the times when we reach a choice-point, heavy in the air, and choose the right thing, the most helpful thing, the thing that steers us closer to something good.

Each unseen act is a promise to ourselves, I think – this is who I could be, this is who I am – and the more we invest in them, the more true that promise becomes.

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