I sat on the edge of her bed while she lay there struggling to breathe. Her body had been ravaged by lung cancer, emphysema, and the aftermath of her lung surgery six months earlier. She looked up at me and, without any warning, said in a labored voice, “Paul, I know…I’m dying…it’s okay.”

My family and I had been hiding from her the doctor’s terminal prognosis (we didn’t want to upset her), but she had obviously figured it out (she was NO dummy). With her words of defeat, I burst into an uncontrollable crying jag that cut through my attempt at being a stoic 18–year old boy about to lose his mother. She was suffering, and soon it would be time for her to leave us.

Underneath the unbearable strain of the impending loss of my mother was the presence of another set of emotions – the fear, doubt, and deeply embedded shame associated with my newly discovered certainty of being gay (see Are You a Friend of Dorothy?). I wanted so desperately to share with her that I’m gay; I wanted to be real with her; I wanted to be loved and accepted by her; but I also wanted to respect the fact that she deserved as much peace as possible during the remaining days or weeks of her life.

For better or worse, I chose to hide my personal revelation. A new, parallel sense of mourning emerged – that I would never have the opportunity to come out to her and she would never know (at least in an earthly way) this very important transition that I was making in my life. We were each making our own transitions and we didn’t have the opportunity to share them fully with each other. I was beginning one of my many transitions from invisible to visible (emotionally, psychologically, interpersonally) and she was beginning the transition from visible to invisible (in a physical or bodily sense).

I never did muster up the strength to come out to her that day. My internal story was that she was too sick to deal with such disappointing and controversial news. More so, I deeply feared that she may reject me outright, tell me to get out, or be so heart-broken that she would die on the spot. Whatever the outcome, I imagined it would be something horrible. 

The next morning I headed back to college, hopeful that I would return within a few weeks. I never saw her again. She died five weeks later, the day before Thanksgiving 1983, while I was making the 5–hour drive home from college. The coroner had removed her body from her bed about one hour before I arrived home. Once again, my mom and I were simultaneously in transition – she to her new home and me to my childhood home.

I suspect that if my mom had continued to live long enough for me to come out to her that she would have struggled, at first, but eventually embraced all of me, that she would have made the effort to understand.

What was a time in your life in which you chose to hide a part of yourself? What did you hide? How did it turn out? What opportunity did you abandon as a result of choosing/needing to hide?

My friend and fellow coach, Kelli Cotner, sends her email contact list a Daily Insight. I always look forward to it, because the message is usually brief, simple, and relevant.

Today’s daily insight comes from Eckhart Tolle:

“Be present as the watcher of your mind — of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.  Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.  Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future.  Don’t judge or analyze what you observe.  Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.  Don’t make a personal problem out of them.  You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.”

How does this relate to visibility or invisibility? What does this quote bring up for you? What are you willing to do differently? I invite you to post your thoughts in the Comments area.

At the beginning of episode two of the new TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah says in a voice-over to the TV audience:

“Maybe if you spend your life hiding who you are, you might finally end up fooling yourself.”

I felt like she was speaking to me (and anyone else who can relate to invisibility). With that one statement, she captured the essence of being invisible – fooling others about who we really are and, ultimately, fooling ourselves to the point of believing the deception.

Invisibility is not about maliciously lying to hurt others, but it is about creating deception for the perceived benefit of survival, conflict avoidance, or other anxiety-avoiding reasons. Eventually, though, we hurt ourselves the most and leave a string of casualties behind us in the form of abandoned relationships and lost opportunities.

Sarah Connor represents the strength and conviction that’s needed to be visible to ourselves and to others. My new friend, Dani Rukin, a lightening-bolt of a life coach, beautifully captures the value of living visibly with this Marianne Williamson quote she shares on her web site:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be?”

Terminate your invisibility by seeing the “…brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous…” you that was meant to live fully in the world. Embrace your power.

Consider the following:

• How will you terminate your invisibility (or how will you make yourself more visible)?
• Imagine living visibly. What becomes possible in your life?
• What are you missing out on by living invisibly (or not living in a fully visible way)?

www.invisiblelives.com

I subscribe to The Advocate, America’s leading gay news and entertainment magazine. In the December 3, 2007 edition, an article titled “Invisible Man” by Robert Harkabus caught my eye.

Robert describes swallowing a double-dose of invisibility – first, as a young gay man succumbing to the pressure from his family, community, and society to “be” straight during the mid-20th century, and then as an older “out” gay man whose age became a barrier to being seen by the youth-oriented gay community.

Robert writes:

“LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] people have had a lot of practice being invisible. For gays like me, who came of age in the 1940s and ’50s, the straight world was a place where we had to stay hidden. Society was much more repressive than it is today, and either people were more naive or they just wouldn’t talk of certain things.”

Eventually, Robert embraced his sexuality, acknowledged his life of invisibility, and recognized that he has powerful, life-changing options:

“Today, I have choices that I never had before. I choose to live in the mainstream community because I can interact with and educate those less enlightened. I can show my fellow gay citizens that older men still contribute to our progress—because I refuse to spend my gay retirement waiting for the grim reaper, and I won’t be invisible.”

Robert is an inspiration for us all – gay or straight, young or old, visible or invisible.

Consider the following:

• What are you willing to do to step out of the shadow of your own invisibility or to help someone else step out of their shadow?
• To what extent is your choice to be invisible influenced by your family, your community, or society?
• To what extent do you actively choose invisibility as a way of avoiding conflict or as a way to blend in?
• What do you do to reinforce invisibility in yourself or in others?

There is no doubt in my mind that shame and invisibility are closely linked. When I read books that explore the issue of shame, the words hide, hiding, hidden, invisible, avoid, avoidance, and conceal routinely surface.

For example, in his 1989 psychoanalytical tome on shame, Andrew P. Morrison, M.D. writes:

“We have all felt shame. We have all suffered feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, incompetence, known a sense of defect and flaw, of failure; been scorned by others – such feelings are among the most painful we can experience. We hide them from ourselves and others.” (page 1, Shame)

And, on page 2, he writes:

“…shame frequently causes one to hide, to avoid interpersonal contact as a protection against rejection, and to conceal the affective experience from one’s own awareness.” (page 2, Shame)

What I notice first is the idea of hiding shame from others AND ourselves. That idea, alone, points to the insidiousness and isolation that shame can create. It seems like a clear link to invisibility.

Consider the following questions:

• How does shame show up in your life?
• How does shame undermine your ability to be visible?
• What have you done to overcome the ravages of shame?

I will continue to explore the relationship between shame and invisibility in future posts.

www.invisiblelives.com

– Guest Post by Thomas Freese, PhD

After nearly 25 years of loving and living with someone who struggles with the issue of invisibility, I have experienced the pain and the joy of seeing him struggle with (and increasingly succeed in) truly being present in the world. The rewards of this journey have been great, if at times painful. My own process has been to try to understand and be supportive of the journey of someone who has difficulty expressing the challenges that he faces. I recently gained a new perspective from an unexpected source.

I reread one of my favorite books, Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn. This book is a tragic allegory of the human condition told through the experience of a carnival family whose parents set out to purposely “breed their own exhibit of human oddities” (back cover). This novel has long been a favorite and, having just completed my third reading, I have realized why. The human condition being dealt with is invisibility.

The central character of the story is Arturo, also known as Aquaboy. He has flippers in place of arms and legs, and began life performing tricks in a large water tank for carnival patrons. As he enters adulthood, he discovers that he has incredible powers of perception and persuasion. He is able to see the secrets that people hope will never be revealed and to help bring out the shame associated with them. In one of the first incidents, he calls an extremely obese woman out of the audience and asks her if she thought she would be happy if she were beautiful, or “is it people not loving you that makes you unhappy? If they don’t love you it’s because there’s something wrong with you. If they love you then it must mean that you are all right” (p. 178). The woman feels understood for the first time and joins the carnival to be near Arturo.

Arturo’s ability to see into the invisible parts of people soon attracts crowds of hundreds to all of his shows and hundreds of cult followers who begin to travel with the show. Arturo’s ability to see and draw out the secret, invisible pieces of people is phenomenal; however, he does not use this gift for good. Instead, he convinces his cult followers that if they were more like him (i.e., less normal), they would be happier. His followers therefore voluntarily submit to removing their limbs, slowly, through repetitive surgeries, piece by piece. In doing this-removing their normalcy-they are gradually amputating their inner sources of shame.

I won’t give away the end of the book. While it is truly tragic, it is brilliantly crafted and should be read in the author’s own words. The message that leapt from the page came long before the end: living invisibly causes people to amputate important and beautiful pieces of themselves. They learn to live without these pieces and continually try to appear normal and well functioning without them. However, as with Arturo’s cult followers, they have more and more difficulty as they are drawn to remove more and more important pieces.

In what ways have you cut off pieces of yourself? What has this removal cost? What would it be like if those cut off pieces no longer had the power to shame?

The painful process of identifying these secret sources of inner shame, claiming them, and then re-attaching them in a way that they lose their shaming force and become sources of power is a long one-but the rewards are beyond measure.

Do you know The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams? It’s a touching story about a stuffed rabbit that becomes real. I read The Velveteen Rabbit for the first time a few years ago. That 20–minute read touched me deeply and reminded me about the process of overcoming invisibility.

Now there is Toni Raiten-D’Antonio’s book, The Velveteen Principles: A Guide to Becoming Real. Drawing on the classic children’s story, Toni beautifully and succinctly describes the process of becoming real (visible). She describes how we objectify ourselves (we turn ourselves into objects instead of being human), push for perfection, ignore our emotions, and strive to be something that we are not and never will be.

Toni captures the essence of what creates invisibility:

The process usually begins early in life, when children are punished for expressing themselves in ways that make adults uncomfortable and rewarded for stifling or denying their true feelings. (page 69)

Her description captures my experience as a child that I wrote about in A Defining Moment.

I appreciated Toni’s description of how she became invisible:

In my childhood, I was trained to make myself as invisible and self-sufficient as possible. My parents pushed this role on me for a number of reasons. The main one may have been because they were both diagnosed with serious and ultimately debilitating illnesses. They were too distraught to focus on a little girl, and they lacked the physical and emotional energy to take care of me. For these reasons and more, I was discouraged from ever voicing a need or desire. I even learned to hate those parts of myself that required care and attention. I believed I had to be perfect in order to be good enough. As I grew up, I continued to believe I must be perfect, always nurturing and available. Of course, those beliefs set me up for an unhappy life as a resentful, empty-hearted martyr. (page 142)

What parts of Toni’s experience resonate with you?

This winter, curl up in front of the fireplace in a cozy chair with a mug of hot chocolate, a comfy blanket, and a stuffed animal and pour yourself into The Velveteen Collection: The Velveteen Principles & The Velveteen Rabbit. Invest four hours in becoming real (visible). It will be worth it.

Hiding in shadows,
Slinking in my dark domain,
Yearning to be seen.

Have you ever written a haiku? It’s a poem with three lines. Line one has 5 syllables, line two has 7, and line three has 5.

It’s a simple formula that can yield powerful results. Mine is above. Will you share your perspective on Invisible Lives with a haiku? For more help with writing your haiku, check out eHow.

I love the concept of Jacquie Hale’s book, Serenity Is an Inside Job. Part inspiration, part inner journey, part celebration, and part simplicity, Serenity Is an Inside Job is a 9–week, self-paced course in how to relieve stress and reclaim your life. It requires only a few minutes a day and will provide lasting value as you engage in developing new habits and new ways of seeing yourself.

The process is simple. On a weekly basis, you will read an inspiring message about a concept that relates to leading a more fulfilling life. These concepts include:

• Finding stillness and breath
• Cultivating your natural genius
• Transforming your limiting beliefs
• Identifying your heart’s desire
• Manifesting your dream
• Creating your five-year vision

On a daily basis, you will engage in brief activities that create mindfulness about whatever concept is on the agenda. Then, for just 5–10 minutes, you will write a response to a powerful question that will help you deepen your learning.

In fewer than 20 minutes a day, you can relieve stress and reclaim your life. Work the process and it will work for you.

Jacquie is a life coach, writer, blogger, web designer and a dear friend. Learn more about Jacquie through her blog or coaching web site. Her book is available in a print version or electronic download.

Some people’s lives are like a suitcase—
Neatly packed
With private articles
Carefully stashed.

I’m not saying that is wrong—
As long as it isn’t
Packed too tightly
Or a person doesn’t lose the key.

—Peggi Lisenbee

[One of my long-time friends, Ruthie, shared this poem with me in 1984. It spoke to me then, and it speaks to me now.]

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