I have spent the better part of four decades trying to figure out how to be a ghost. I’ve never struggled with having a personality.
What I’ve struggled with is occupancy.
I’ve been trying to solve an equation that cannot be solved: how to exist in a room without displacing any air. How to move through a hallway without creating friction. How to inhabit a life without consuming the resources required to sustain it.
Being visible isn’t simply being seen. It’s what happens after I’m seen. About staying where I am once the attention lands. About not shrinking, not apologizing, not quietly stepping out of the frame once I’ve been noticed.
I entered this life already knowing this. In the earliest moments, when visibility wasn’t optional—it was the difference between surviving and slipping away. I had to announce my presence to the world; I had to be noticed to be nourished. To be seen is to be fed, warmed, protected, and kept alive. Crying isn’t a bid for attention; it’s communication. I am here. You are needed. There’s no shame in that. Visibility is simply how care moves.
That hasn’t changed. To be seen is to be held.
And to hold someone—to really see them—comes with responsibility.
Instead of demanding a reckoning with that responsibility, I learned to make myself easier to see. More efficient. More useful. More justifiable. I learned how to take up space conditionally—only when invited, only when necessary, only when I could explain why I deserved it. This wasn’t a belief system. It was logistics. I’ve been operating under the quiet delusion that if I could just be small enough, quiet enough, low-maintenance enough, I could trick the universe into forgetting to bill me for my existence.
Attention flickers. It’s brief, transactional, a glance that lands and moves on. Visibility is the quiet knowing that I exist in someone’s space even when they’re not looking. Attention measures moments. Visibility measures presence.
There’s no shame in that. There’s no moral weight assigned. Visibility is simply how care moves.
Somewhere along the way, that changes.
Visibility gets relabeled as “attention.”
Attention becomes something to manage.
Then something to monetize.
Then something to be embarrassed about wanting at all.
We absorb the lesson quickly. Want too much attention and you’re vain, needy, performing. Want too little and you’re withdrawn, broken, suspicious. Either way, you’ve misjudged the amount. The rules keep shifting, and the punishment is usually some version of shame. What disappears in that shift is the original agreement.
Visibility draws response—questions, expectations, projections. It asks something of other people. I’m already managing a lot, and it feels safer to disappear a little than to risk being a burden.
I treat my own body as an inconvenience. My metabolism an act of aggression. To inhale felt like stealing oxygen that had been available to everyone else. To speak felt like dominating the sonic frequency of a room.
I’ve learned how to become low-maintenance.
How to be agreeable.
How to move through rooms like I’m trying not to disturb the furniture.
Living with a genetic condition and chronic illness has made it impossible to pretend I’m not here. My body announces itself—through pain, fatigue, slowness, accommodation. Something I can no longer override with competence or charm. I can’t make myself smaller without paying for it later.
It’s forced a reckoning.
Physics keeps receipts.
To live is to be a displacement engine. This is the Archimedes principle: a body immersed in fluid pushes that fluid out of the way. When I enter a crowded coffee shop, I’m an object of a specific volume. I occupy coordinates in space-time that no one else can.
There is a particular exhaustion that comes from walking through the world while trying to simulate having zero mass. You know the posture: shoulders rolled forward, elbows tucked in, the “sorry” mumbled before a collision has even occurred. It’s the physical geometry of an apology.
Here’s the irony: trying to violate the laws of physics is incredibly expensive.
In thermodynamics, there is no such thing as a passive state of holding back. If you hold a spring down, you aren’t doing nothing—you’re storing energy. Hiding isn’t neutral. It’s a high-friction performance.
The effort required to keep myself maintenance-free is immense. Drafting a message asking for help that sounds like I really need it, but not so much that it makes the other person stressed or uncomfortable, can take ten times as much energy as simply saying what I need. It’s like physical tension required to sit in the middle seat of an airplane without brushing arms with my neighbors; it’s a high-intensity isometric workout. I generate more heat trying to play it cool than I ever do by simply existing.
My fear isn't just about being visible, perceived…witnessed. It's about being considered an invasive species. I worry that my "self"—my wants, my loud laugh, my weird opinions, my needs—is like kudzu. If I let it grow, it will choke out the native flora of the people around me. But this view assumes that the world is a fragile garden and I am a weed. It assumes that "Space" is a finite pie, and if I take a slice, someone else starves. But that assumes the world is too delicate to hold me. Physics offers a gentler truth. The universe keeps expanding. Energy moves and changes form, but it doesn’t disappear.
So I’m going to try a different experiment.
I’m not doing the self-help work of pumping myself up. I’m just succumbing to gravity.
I am admitting that I am matter.
Matter has mass.
Matter occupies volume.
Matter goes somewhere.
This reframing doesn’t start with bravery. It starts with permission.
Permission to be seen without earning it.
Permission to take up space without optimizing it.
Permission to be alive in a way that doesn’t translate neatly into attention, value, or profit.
I’m lowering my shoulders not because I love myself, but because it’s inefficient to hold them up. I’m speaking at a normal volume not because I have something profound to say, but because my vocal cords are instruments designed to vibrate air.
I’m no longer trying to be a ghost.
It’s bad science.
And honestly, it’s exhausting.
I don’t need to be unapologetically alive. That sounds like work.
I just need to be alive.
Tiffani
