Disappearing Act: Part One

Very useful, until it's not.

My brother and I were playing hide-and-seek with some friends in their apartment. All the grownups were drinking coffee and smoking at the kitchen table.
I ran into the kitchen and saw the perfect hiding place.

I asked my mom to sit on me.

I was almost 12, and my mom was still bigger than me.
She sat on me, and no one found me.

I won!

Sort of.

No one came looking.

No one even thought to look in the kitchen, where I was sitting underneath my mom.

I felt clever, but lonely.

Then my brother, Paul, came into the kitchen and said, “Did any of you see Eri? Did she leave?”

My mom began laughing. She stood up, and there I was.

“That’s not fair!” yelled Paul.

“What’s not fair?” because after all, wasn’t it fair that I had done something so clever and smart… no one could find me? Wasn’t that the point of hide-and-seek?

We argued. I don’t remember the specifics, and there were no lasting hard feelings about it (I hope).

But now I understand how much of my youth I spent disappearing with my mom’s tacit consent and, indeed, her need to have an invisible daughter.

Disappearing was useful for avoiding conflict.
Postponing it, I mean.

So I’m doing some stuff that’s difficult for me:

learning about Claude Code. And I do not know if the code in the picture is Claude Code because at the time, I could not even install Claude Code on my Terminal (I feel like such a noob!)

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

And it’s damn hard.

It’s been a long, long, long time since I even used HTML.¹ I find myself not losing interest, but losing myself, and wanting to disappear.

But I’m not going to disappear.

I’m going to wrestle with it. It may not be fun or useful for me, but I think engagement is what I need to do instead of emojifying my response. Wish me luck, strength, light, love, all your useful and sweet thoughts!

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1. Does anyone remember HTML? I am haunted by brackets. Endless brackets.