Invisibility: Life Outside the Box

I suppose my time as a government bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., prepared me for the world.

I was a creature of emotional immediacy who was always ready to risk for the sake of others. To offer comfort and understanding. To say, with my whole heart, you are not alone, I feel for you, I am with you.

Rules, regulations, red tape. These were so many blanks on a form I did not want to fill out. Around me, the true bureaucrats in their navy suits rushed to their desks, slammed doors in my face, pressed buttons to send elevators ascending as I tentatively extended a toe or a finger. 

The bureaucrats worked while their wives gave birth to children. The bureaucrats worked while they had heart attacks. The bureaucrats asked why I occasionally laughed. The bureaucrats arrived before sunrise and never left their offices before dark. 

It was a job that paid good money and that was a living death for me. My skills, emotional and expressive, were merely liabilities, shameful things, not to be recognized or discussed. 

Every time my security clearance came up for renewal, the FBI had difficulty registering my fingerprints. The tough treatment I had for cancer, in the eyes of my federal employer, was nothing but a logistical problem. Something about me resisted categorization, refused to commit to black and white on a law enforcement form. A man in gray repeatedly rolled my fingers in ink and pressed my hand flat as a dead flower. Still, I didn’t register.

Invisibility, in this case, was a portent. 

Invisibility as opportunity: Goodbye, rote functionary. Hello, shadow figure, hero that requires no recognition, no recompense.  

Having fought my way out of bureaucracy, I find it sad and funny that I trapped myself in that box for so long. I am inherently, innately, not a bureaucrat. I have never in my life been saved by a bureaucrat. The times I have been close to death, I have been rescued and redeemed by people who neither think nor live in a box, who rather blow up boxes for a living, who improvise and who innovate, because the only real solutions are not found in manuals, textbooks, or policies.

Freedom. It is a beautiful, difficult thing. It is a sublime gift to create a path no one else can invent or follow. 

It may be lonely and frustrating, but it is also thrilling, to find my true voice, my true passion, leaving the pencil-pushers looking for their sharpeners, leaving the box checkers to tick with their instruments of lead.

I am lighter now and moving quickly. A filament of flesh and fancy. 

Now you see me, now you don’t.

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Some doors are best kept closed