The woman at the glass doors wasn't watching the world go by.
She was deciding when to let it in.
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The Woman at the Glass Doors
Today I sat in front of my double glass doors watching the world go by.
It was too hot to open them. Ninety degrees outside. But through the glass I could see all of it — cars moving back and forth, neighbors stopping on the sidewalk to talk, a young man running because he was late for something that mattered to him. And above it all, the large oak trees casting their long graceful shadows over everything, the sun catching the leaves just right, turning an ordinary Monday afternoon into something quietly beautiful.
Every once in a while somebody I know passes by and I’ll crack the door and say hello.
“Hey, Miss Monica.”
They all call me Miss Monica now.
And as I sat there today, it hit me so hard I actually stopped breathing for a second:
I have become the old woman who watches the world go by.
And I didn’t even notice when it happened.
My first instinct was sadness. A quiet, creeping kind of grief about invisibility. About children who call less often. About days that pass in near silence. About a physical world that seems to be moving on without me.
And then I caught myself.
Why did I go straight there?
That’s the question worth sitting with. Because I went to pity almost immediately — before I even examined whether pity was warranted. Before I asked whether what I was feeling was actually loss, or simply the absence of noise I never needed in the first place.
I think I know why.
Women of my generation were taught that worth is measured in how much we are needed. How available we are. How many people are calling, asking, requiring something from us. We learned early that being busy with other people’s needs meant we mattered. And when those needs quiet down — when the children have their own lives, when the obligations thin out, when the house gets still — the old wiring interprets that silence as failure.
But here’s what’s actually true about my life right now.
I have built something real in this solitude. Today alone I worked on YouTube, wrote an article, answered comments, and painted. My work gives structure to my days. Meaning. Purpose. Identity. It is not busywork. It is not filler. It is real.
And I know myself well enough to know this: if I had people around me all day long needing things from me, I could not do this work. Full stop.
The solitude didn’t happen to me. I chose it. Quietly, gradually, without fully realizing I was choosing it. Because every bit of availability costs energy, and I finally have something worth spending that energy on.
So why did I call it invisibility?
If this landed for you — if you’ve ever caught yourself mid-pity and wondered where the reflex came from — this is the conversation we have every Tuesday night.
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