Do you ever have one of those days where you just want to burst into tears for no discernable reason? Yeah, me neither.

(picture me kicking the dirt with my toe, head hanging down)

Ok, that might have happened to me once… on Thursday… when my invisibility cloak came out of retirement.

It was a typical day at work. I’d gone through the standard “why-God-why” mantra when forcing myself out of bed for work. I’d arrived at work thinking something along the lines of, “There has to be more than this.” I braced for impact when a particularly abrasive colleague asked for something ASAP—which naturally meant drop everything you are doing to help me because I’m stomping my foot and I said so, rather than a reflection of any actual urgency. I dealt with it with my usual aplomb: completing the request while mentally re-writing my resignation letter to exchange “regretfully” to “gleefully.”

It was an ordinary day.

At lunch, I escaped to a little café near work. It was early for normal humans to be eating lunch, so there was only one other customer waiting (she had already ordered). I walked up to the counter. The woman behind the counter was on the phone taking an order, so I waited. She finished the order call and turned away from me to submit the order. I remained at the counter patiently and contemplated my life. She turned back around and picked up her cell phone. She texted. She turned to talk to the other person in the room bagging up a delivery order. She turned back around towards me. She went back to texting. Just as I was about to say something to her, a man walked into the café. She immediately looked up and asked him if she could take his order.

I looked around. Did anyone else notice that I was being totally ignored? No.

No one noticed me at all.

Normally, I pride myself for being undetectable. I like being the “man behind the curtain,” so to speak. But to my dismay, I started to feel my nose get red and my eyes well up. And I just turned around and walked out. I never said a word and no one ever acknowledged that I was there.

They never saw me. I didn’t count.

It was an ordinary day.

I’m not loud. I’m not brash. I don’t take what I want. I’m the consequence girl who works hard and thinks that slow and steady will be enough. I’m polite—even to people I can’t stand. And I don’t count.

It was an ordinary day.

Kate