Beauty inVisibility by Huda Shulaiba REQUIRED PREREADING (it’s not homework. Just Google it.): DuBois’s theory of doubleconsciousness. Look into the racial disparities in schizophrenia diagnoses while you’re at it. All of that is to say: no, I am not being paranoid or dramatic or overreacting.
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isibility is peculiar in its distribution. It’s one of those things in our lives that we take for granted, not realizing we have it until it’s gone, or vice versa. I think about visibility a lot these days, walking around a city that feels imbued with visibility, more opaque than the squat-proof Lululemon leggings I hear so much about. It’s a luxury afforded only to certain subsets of people. If you need me to enumerate to you which ones, my required reading list was way too short. I recognize what I don’t have in short bursts before my mind makes the executive decision to go blank, turning to selective amnesia to protect itself from a constant state of despair. I don’t get to have random small interactions around here. Sometimes I think the fabric wrapped around my head
makes people think I’m a robot, capable of nothing more than a routine greeting and occasional class discussion post. Back home, I’m average. I love being average. Being average means I don’t have to question my existence every time I walk to class alone. Here, no one even sees me. I’m not asking for hello or anything, but it’d be nice for them to at least try to acknowledge my presence just long enough to avoid running into me on the sidewalk. When the guy standing in front of me waiting to get tested for COVID turned back to talk and joke in the interim, I had to grapple with the sudden awareness that he was the first person who had spoken to me like a real person since I’d moved back in. I had forgotten what it was like to be treated like a person and not a houseplant. To be casually spoken to and acknowledged
and looked at rather than looked through. Let that sink in for a moment. I completely forgot what it was like to be casually spoken to, even greeted. We spoke for two minutes. Though we were prematurely interrupted when his name was called, it was the most enriching exchange I’d had with a stranger in months. I notice other things, too. For one, no one says bless you when I sneeze in class. I thought I was being sensitive when I first suspected it, but I paid attention long enough to see every other sneeze in our small class of 23 was getting blessed. If I were going just off that class alone, I’d guess the only sneezes allowed to be blessed had to come from faces that pass the paper bag test. Even common courtesy was like a far-flung fantasy to me 50 pounds
