Are middle-aged women really invisible? I see them everywhere – and not just in the mirror | Emma Beddington

Gillian Anderson, Rose Byrne, Melinda Gates: there’s no getting away from these passionate and prominent figures. Even I feel more exposed than I’d like to be

Am I, a middle-aged woman, invisible? There’s a picture of me near these words; can you see it, or am I a blur, like a perp on Traffic Cops who wouldn’t sign a release? Anecdotal evidence from last week is mixed: seeing a friend my age on Thursday night, we got served easily and the waiting staff were politely attentive, even though – or because – I was radiating heat-induced derangement. (At one point, I told a waiter, wild-eyed: “I’m dying – I’m from the north.”) The next morning, I had to dodge a massive sandbag thrown by a man in the gym who definitely didn’t see me, but he was so locked in I doubt he would have noticed Zendaya doing star jumps.

I’ve been wondering, because I recently read the cultural commentator Mireille Silcoff in the New York Times rebuffing the idea that, at 53, she is invisible. “I am not vanishing,” she wrote. “I even feel, quite regularly, that I am in some kind of prime.”