The Weight of Being Seen

Dr. Sarah Chen had always been invisible in exactly the way she preferred.

Growing up, she'd perfected the art of camouflage: straight A's that never drew attention, achievements delivered quietly, a pleasant smile that deflected deeper inquiry. She'd learned early that being a Chinese American girl meant navigating a narrow corridor—too successful and you were a threat, too struggling and you confirmed stereotypes, too loud and you were aggressive, too quiet and you were a doormat.

So she'd made herself smooth, frictionless, easy to overlook.

Medical school had reinforced the lesson. Be competent but not intimidating. Be confident but not arrogant. Smile when men interrupted you. Never cry. By the time she finished her neurology residency, she'd mastered the performance so completely she sometimes forgot it was one.

Then came the diagnosis.

Multiple sclerosis. Relapsing-remitting. Prognosis uncertain.

The first symptom had been numbness in her left hand during a complex surgery. She'd switched instruments, finished the procedure, then spent three hours in the hospital bathroom trying not to fall apart. The second symptom was vision problems. The third, a weakness in her legs that made her stumble during rounds.

Each new symptom felt like a crack in the careful porcelain of her professional identity.

She tried to hide it. Of course she did. She'd spent her whole life hiding—hiding her exhaustion, her doubts, her father's alcoholism, her mother's depression, every messy human thing that might make her seem less than perfectly competent. What was one more secret?

But MS wasn't interested in her performance.

The day she collapsed in the ICU, in front of colleagues and patients and the chief of surgery who'd never quite believed women belonged in his OR, was the day her invisibility shattered.

Suddenly, everyone was looking at her. Really looking.

The attention was suffocating. Colleagues who'd barely acknowledged her existence now approached with concern that felt like voyeurism. The chief sent flowers with a card suggesting she "take time to focus on health," which they both understood meant early retirement. Her mother called daily, voice thick with worry and something that sounded like vindication—hadn't she always said Sarah was working too hard, sacrificing too much?

The hospital offered her a generous disability package. "No pressure," the HR director said, pressure dripping from every word.

Sarah had become hypervisible overnight, but only as a problem to be solved, a liability to be managed, a tragedy to be pitied. Not as a doctor. Not as a person. Just as a body that had failed to hold up its end of the social contract: to be productive, independent, uncomplicated.

She thought about accepting the package. Disappearing again, this time into the role of sick person, invalid, former doctor whose promise was cut short. It would be easier. Expected. A narrative everyone already knew how to process.

Instead, she did something that terrified her: she insisted on staying.

The accommodations she needed felt like admissions of weakness. A cane for bad days. Permission to sit during long procedures. Scheduled rest periods. Speech-to-text software when her hands didn't cooperate. Each request felt like stripping away another layer of the armor she'd built.

But something strange happened in the exposure.

She discovered that some of her patients—the ones with chronic conditions, with invisible disabilities, with bodies that refused to cooperate—relaxed around her in ways they never had before. They asked questions they'd been afraid to ask. They admitted struggles they'd hidden from "healthy" doctors.

An elderly woman with Parkinson's whispered, "You understand what it's like when your body betrays you."

A teenager with epilepsy said, "You're the first doctor who doesn't look at me like I'm broken."

Sarah realized she'd spent so long trying to be perfect that she'd forgotten how to be human. And in her humanity—messy, struggling, visibly disabled—she'd become a better doctor than she'd ever been when she was invisible.

But the transformation wasn't clean or simple. Some days she resented every stare, every lowered voice, every assumption that she needed help. She missed moving through the world unnoticed. She hated that her body had become public property, subject to commentary, questions, unsolicited advice from strangers about diets and meditation and have-you-tried-yoga.

She especially hated the inspiration speeches. "You're so brave," people said, as if continuing to exist while disabled required some extraordinary courage rather than just being Tuesday.

Then she met James.

He was a physical therapist, blind since birth, who consulted at the hospital. Over coffee one afternoon, Sarah confessed her frustration with the constant visibility.

"Before, I was invisible. Now I feel like I'm performing disability for everyone's consumption. I don't know which is worse."

James laughed, not unkindly. "I've never been invisible a day in my life. People see the blindness first, last, and always. They narrate my entire existence around it."

"So how do you live with it?"

"I decided that if people are going to see me anyway, I might as well be as exactly myself as possible. Not the inspirational blind guy. Not the tragic victim. Not the overcompensating superhuman. Just... me. Complicated, occasionally annoying, absolutely mediocre at cooking, me."

Sarah thought about that. About how she'd spent decades performing a version of herself that was palatable, professional, perfect. How she'd hidden not just her disability but her whole messy humanity—her anger, her ambition, her fear, her joy.

What if the cracks in her identity weren't failures but invitations? Not to perform disability better, but to stop performing entirely?

She started small. She stopped smiling when she wasn't happy. Stopped apologizing for needing accommodations. Started admitting when she was tired, when she needed help, when she didn't have answers. She let herself be angry at her body, at the disease, at the medical system that saw disability as disqualification.

She also let herself be whole. A good doctor and a person with MS. Accomplished and struggling. Visible and entitled to privacy. Both diminished by loss and expanded by it.

She started a support group for medical professionals with chronic conditions. She wrote an article about ableism in medicine that got her uninvited from a conference and invited to three others. She fell in love with a social worker who saw her—really saw her, past the performance and the disability both—and loved the complicated person underneath.

Sarah Chen was no longer invisible. But she was no longer performing either.

She was simply, impossibly, herself: cracked and whole, seen and private, disabled and capable, all the contradictions held together by the stubborn insistence that she was allowed to take up space, even the messy, complicated kind.

The fracture hadn't destroyed her identity. It had freed her from it.

About the Author: Sifat Parveen has completed her Diploma in Elementary Education and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science at Jamia Millia Islamia. She has a deep interest in literature and creative expression.

Twin Flame

His room was empty. Bhavya stood at the doorway, the silence hitting her like a truth she'd tried hard to deny. "Of all the things I imagined... this, I wasn't prepared for," she thought.

What hurt more than his absence was the weight of all the conversations that never happened. The words she swallowed. The glances that lingered too long. The hope that always overstayed its welcome.

She turned away, slow and reluctant, like leaving meant accepting the end. Her thoughts wandered to a day that hadn't arrived yet — the day she'd see him again. Maybe he'll smile, she mused. That would be enough. In her wildest dreams, he'd say her name. Ask her how she's been. But dreams are gentle liars, and she had learned not to trust them.

As she walked past the corridor, something caught her eye — a nameplate.

Mr. Deepak, Manager.

The letters were too familiar, too loud for her comfort. That name had once been an anchor, quietly tying her to this place, urging her to linger just a little longer. And now, it would be just another name she passed by. Another fleeting footnote in a story that never got written.

Their lives couldn't have been more different. Deepak — younger, a board member, born under a zodiac sign that was astrologically all wrong for her. Their aptitudes clashed, their rhythms rarely aligned. And yet, Bhavya called him her twin flame.

It was a strange kind of harmony — where the contrasts didn't divide, but deepened the bond. In the end, it wasn't compatibility that wrote their story, but memories — vivid and lasting — stitched together by the simple curve of his smile. Perhaps no one had ever smiled at her the way he did. With so much knowing. So much quiet intensity.

Back in the feeder cab, Bhavya leaned her head against the window, letting the hum of the city blur into background noise. Her mind drifted to the first time she saw him. That corridor, bathed in morning light. He wore a light blue shirt. She was in a lavender saree, walking slowly, eyes cast sideways.

Somewhere behind her, she felt footsteps. A presence. But she brushed it off — she was never one to notice who looked at her. Still, something tugged at her attention. Instinct, maybe.

Then their eyes met. A quiet, electric pause. She knew — he'd been watching her for a while. That moment, suspended in the silence of that hallway, became a memory she'd hold onto forever.

First look.

First day.

And unknowingly, the beginning of everything.

The cab rolled to a stop at her gate in barely ten minutes, jolting Bhavya out of her drifting dreams. With a reluctant sigh, she stepped out, her heart lingering somewhere between reality and imagination. In a secret, foolish corner of her mind, she wished for something utterly impossible — to see Deepak waiting for her, leaning casually against his famous car, the one with that fancy number she could never forget.

A soft, wistful smile played on her lips. Silly girl, she thought. That's never going to happen.

The evening air was thick with a loneliness she couldn't quite shake as she walked into her empty house. She tossed her bag aside and reached for her phone — a ritual born from hope, from habit. As her fingers slid across the screen, a reckless thought seized her.

What if I just text him?

"No," she whispered aloud, battling herself. You're always the one who texts first. Always the one who cares too much. But Bhavya knew herself too well — knew the aching impatience that clawed at her when it came to Deepak. Before she could talk herself out of it, her fingers were already typing, heart pounding in defiance of her better judgment:

"Dear Deepak, I wished to see you, but you had already left the office."

A breath hitched in her throat as she hit send. The moment the message was gone, a wave of guilt crashed over her, heavier than she expected. You shouldn't have done that, her mind scolded. You should have let it be. But it was too late.

Now, all she could do was wait.

She stared at the screen, willing the little blue ticks to appear, craving even the smallest sign that he had read her message, that somewhere, in some corner of his mind, she mattered. Seconds dragged into minutes. Minutes stretched into something heavier, lonelier.

Nothing.

Bhavya clutched her phone tighter, the silence louder than any answer she could have received.

A moment later, the weight of reality pressed down on her, sharp and unforgiving. Doubts curled around her heart like creeping vines, tightening with every passing second.

Is it right to feel this way? she asked herself. To harbor such emotions when you're already married, when you have a child waiting for you in the next room?

The guilt seeped in quietly, a slow, suffocating tide. She wasn't foolish enough to mistake her feelings for a harmless crush. No, it was something far deeper, something that lived in the spaces between her heartbeat — raw, consuming, undeniable.

It wasn't the thrill of forbidden excitement. It wasn't the loneliness of a fading marriage seeking an escape. It was something more dangerous: the feeling that, in another life, in another story, this young man could have been her whole world.

But life was not a story where she could simply rewrite the characters. Bhavya closed her eyes for a long moment, feeling the war raging inside her — between the woman she was, and the woman she longed, just for a fleeting second, to be.

About the Author:

Dr. Devika S received her PhD from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and her post-graduation from The English and Foreign Languages University (formerly CIEFL). Her areas of interest include Travel Literature, East-West Encounter, Comparative Philosophy, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Comparative Religions, Translation Studies, and Women's Studies. She is also a language trainer, academician, and writer, and has conducted language training programs for more than 500 trainees, including students and language teachers across Kerala. She currently teaches at SCMS Cochin School of Business, Ernakulam.

Review of Medusa (A Collection of Poems)

By Nandini Sahu

Published by Black Eagle Books, 2025

ISBN: 978-1-64560-693-2 (Paperback)

Price: 300 INR

Language: English, pp. 126

       With the release of Nandini Sahu's tenth collection of poetry, Medusa, it is high time we look at this work with rapt attention. This collection is a departure from her earlier works, and there are new ways to explore the volume. Medusa is a work deserving a place amongst classics. While posterity will have the answer for certain, yet in my humble opinion, Medusa will continue to let its lines shine forth for generations to come.

The title Medusa is interesting and intriguing. Sahu is re-examining the myth of Medusa, a part of the huge, intertwining, intertextual, polyphonic stories of ancient Greek mythology. "Because Medusa's head was placed on Athena's shield and her blood was revealed to hold the power of both life and death, her head became a symbol of protection. Medusa was one of the three Gorgons, daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, sisters of the Granae, and Ladon—all dreadful and formidable beings," writes Sahu in the Preface to the book. Sahu scripts écriture féminine by bearing her voice, which comes through abject nullification of different versions of narratives of the woman as the 'other'.

Sahu adds a contemporary poetic view, and in her hands, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. She wants to communicate, and each poem is a story she has re-interpreted, deconstructed, reframed, and reshaped around the real woman. "She bends to none, she is indomitable/ that is the paradox of strength in her soft hands./ In lands unknown, she flourishes unseen,/ through a vine that twines/ through cracks of some ancient wall./ Silent footsteps, she grows,/ rooted in soil she did not choose the source" ("An Ode to Every Woman"). In the poem "Manthan—A Ghazal," where love is/as manthan, she talks about cultural symbolism and deftly fuses the West and the East, and a meta-poetic foil is present in a subtle way. "In my 'manthan', you elected glory/ for me and for yourself, venom was kept./ Nandini's conjecture—love churned me,/ this love was my 'manthan'."

It is relevant to her readers that her poetry has the potential to change, and she adopts or rather embraces a straightforward, simple style. While she urges them to revisit the other works, she comes back refreshed, and there is a transformation which is her hallmark. "Sometimes we become more of exhibits than persons./ Then all liberties are taken quite deliberate./ Like a letter, sometimes destiny has to be picked/ from where we left it last" ("As the Going Gets Tough"). There is a luminosity she brings face to face with the truth, which resonates throughout the book. In "Imago," Sahu writes, "I carry this face like the national flag/ On Independence Day/ hoping one day to meet it/ unabridged."

Throughout the collection, there is grief, loss, pain, and there is transcendence. Some poems, like "God's Elect," are paradoxically powerful, where we have the image of the woman as blessed and cursed; these poems are dialogues with the self. "She is fractured yet complete/ a paradox of past and present/ a transformed woman/ wrapped in the same skin/ carrying the jagged edges of someone else's angst." There is also an ecocritical touch to some of the poems, and here Nandini is prakriti; there is a constant rhythm and lyrical resonance.

The titular poem and the collection Medusa come to the readers through a gendered post-colonial adaptation of a myth in a way that interrogates shared concerns over the ever-evolving relationship between a woman and her milieu, simultaneously narrativizing her many selves through ever-renewing discourses. "My écriture féminine takes encounters/ with conformist patriarchal schemes./ I address this by the edifice of our robust/ self-narratives and letterings./ You, my delectable, are with me in this scheme,/ in my Medusa epoch." Medusa richly adds to the genre of English poetry.

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About the Reviewer:

Dr. Sutanuka Ghosh Roy is an Associate Professor of English at Tarakeswar Degree College, The University of Burdwan. She has published widely and presented papers at national and international seminars. She is a regular contributor to anthologies and national and international journals of repute like Text, Journal of Writing and Writing Courses (Australia), Kervan International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies (University of Turin, Italy), Fiar (University of Bielefeld, Germany), Muse India, Setu, Lapiz Lazuli, The Times of India, The Statesman, Life and Legends, Kitaab, etc. Her poems have been anthologized and published in Setu, Piker Press, Harbinger Asylum, Teesta Journal, etc. The titles of her books are Critical Inquiry: Text, Context, and Perspectives, Commentaries: Elucidating Poetry, Rassundari Dasi's Amar Jiban: A Comprehensive Study, and Ashprishya (translated into Bengali, a novel by Sharan Kumar Limbale). Opera is her debutant collection of poetry. She is also a reviewer, a poet, and a critic.