Please Look At Me - by Faye🥀

Five years ago, I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I was really young at the time, probably too young to even fully grasp everything the book was saying, but I could relate to that character in a way I’d never experienced with any other book before. I don’t remember how long I sat there reading the book. I just remember getting to that paragraph and stopping. “I am an invisible man. I am not a spook that haunted Edgar Allen Poe or one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and blood, fiber and liquid and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, because people simply refuse to see me….when they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination— indeed, everything and anything except me.” I read it over and over again— not because I didn’t understand but because he understood too well. Then I broke down and cried. I was fourteen years old at the time, and a Black man from 1952 reached across time and distance and gave a name to a loneliness I’d been carrying around my entire life. For so long, I’ve been screaming. Not out loud— because what’s the point? I’ve been screaming inside, at the top of my lungs: LOOK AT ME. I EXIST. I AM A PERSON. HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE ME?! But nobody looks at me or hears me. They take one glance and they’ve already decided. They’ve written my whole story without me. Without me… The utter arrogance of it makes me sick. I’m not invisible by accident. No. They actively decide that their assumptions, imaginations and comfort matters so much more than the human being standing in front of them. When they approach me, they see their own fears. Their own guilt. A statistic. A cautionary tale. Indeed, everything and anything except me. I’ve spent so many years being angry. But I’m not angry anymore. I promise. I’m tired. I’m just— Please. Please look at me. I’m not asking for much. I’m just asking you to see me. One time. Just once. Look at me like I have a mind that thinks and a heart that breaks and a life that’s just as real and complex and worthy as yours! I have Ellison’s words committed to memory and etched in heart. I carry them everywhere because they’re proof that someone, somewhere once understood me. I’ve memorized a dead man’s understanding of me. I can recite it perfectly. But I’ve never had the privilege of memorizing a living person saying my name like I matter.

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