Sometimes it feels like it's not that hard to see why I feel ignored, or intentionally left out, or looked through as though I weren't there. We've had a...ah, for fuck's sake, I'm just going to say how it feels to me, a friend of a friend of my brother's living at our house. She finally got a place to live and has been saying she'll be moving out. So I offer to help. I've offered several times, and each time she accepted the help. But then the days come and she doesn't come out of her room, or she's gone for the entire day, or she says she'll be doing it later in the day, after I've gone to work and can't help anymore, and then she brings one of her own friends along and they move things by themselves later in the day because they're going on a hike in the morning, instead of moving things, that morning like she originally said. Guess I'm just an annoyance to have to maneuver around, so I'm not in the way.
Then the other night is trivia night. Usually my brother and his friends all go to a restaurant that has this trivia night every week, and then they do something after. Usually it's drinking at one of their places and I don't drink, but I don't mind hanging out in the background and occasionally talking it up with some of them. I had to work this last time, but I figured that trivia ends just a little before I get out of work, so maybe I could meet up after and hang out. But after texting my brother to see what, if any, plans were happening, he gives me the answer I expected. They're drinking at one of their places. But that's all he says, and he puts one of these at the end of the sentence: ...  What the - okay, clearly that is not an invitation to come join them. And I hate inviting myself or going places I might not be wanted, I hate it. In that ellipsis is a break, a pause, a hesitation, a reconsideration of "I don't know if I want him to come here." Maybe I'm seeing too much into it, but that's how I think. If I'm not directly invited or included, I assumed I'm not wanted.
I even get it at work with customers. I work in retail, nothing terribly exciting. I go up to the register to help ring customers up because there's a fairly long line. I call out that I can help the next person in line. The people literally walk past me, never once looking in my direction to the manager at the end who is not helping customers. He just happens to be there at the moment. It just made my heart sink. I mean, for fuck's sake, I'm taller than pretty much all of my coworkers and certainly bigger than any of them at the registers at the moment. I'm not a small person, or someone you'd miss. I just...don't get how you can look right through me like that. Do I blend into the shelves behind me? Do I turn invisible? Do people see me and instantly forget I exist?

I don't know. I wish it didn't seem like people were brushing off my very existence.