Society ‘disappears’ ageing women. So I harnessed that cloak of invisibility to do all sorts of ‘inappropriate’ things

Street artist Deborah Wood pasted an image of screaming older women in Hosier Lane in Melbourne and asked women going past what would they like to yell about. Those words were then pasted coming out of the mouths. Photograph: Deborah Wood

The notion of becoming invisible as an ageing woman has become an accepted trope. My friends and I, from our late 50s onwards, were first gobsmacked then increasingly enraged at being talked over, not served, not replied to, brushed aside and not taken seriously. Small accretions of casual insult that eroded our hard-earned sense of self and agency.

Instead of simmering in a stew of rage and resentment I began to wonder if that conferred invisibility could be harnessed. If I reframed it as a cloak of invisibility I could do all sorts of things “inappropriate” for my age.