INVISIBLE

Those of you still of an age to claim youth had better look away now - because you don't want to hear this! It is one of the less well known aspects of female ageing that you become increasingly invisible ... and you do notice that people don't seem to see you as a person any more, just another older person. I hate that, so I did a journal page about it.

Once again I began with a blank page on which I stamped, drew and wrote ... the figure is a Stampotique stamp, and you either love them or hate them! All the colour on this page is done with Promarkers.

I know I must have been guilty of this myself at a earlier stage in my life - lumping old/older people together as an amorphous mass, but life taught me to see people, all people, as individuals who matter, both to themselves and to others. It's incredibly painful for me to be treated as a person of no account - although whether that says more about my vanity than society I can't say! All I know is that it hurts sometimes ....
I keep thinking of that poem by Dylan Thomas where it says "do not go gentle into that good night; rage rage against the dying of the light". So I am ... not going gently or quietly, not drifting towards pensionerhood without a struggle. I'm a person not a statistic!

There's been a lot in the media lately about people living on Benefits (government assistance) basically suggesting that all such are lazy, feckless cheats and scroungers, who should be made to get off their backsides and work! I'm one of them, a person with a chronic illness rather than someone who can't be bothered to work. Most of us are.

So there you are, a bit of a rant really, but it gets it off my chest dunnit? It only struck me as odd afterwards that although the page has a negative topic, its actually quite bright and lively. I think that must be because I was also trying to celebrate everything that is real and alive in me and my life? I may be down, but am most certainly not out! Ignore me? Don't you DARE!!