As women age, we begin to fade from view, moving from vibrant, to translucent, to invisible.
To young husbands and little children, women shine like a sun at the center of their universe.
Soon enough, those same husbands only pretend to listen when we speak. Those same children dismiss us with a flip of the wrist.
And the rest of the world, full of people who might have once thought we were pretty or interesting, does not even see us when we pass.
Susan Boyle struck more than a blow for those invisible women. She struck 30 million blows.
She is the spinster lady from a little village in Scotland who braved an eye-rolling, mocking audience and a dismissive panel of judges on Britain's Got Talent, the United Kingdom's wildly popular talent show, and brought them all to their feet - and nearly to tears - with her beautiful voice.
Since her performance, which rated three thumbs up from the judges and a chance to win the entire competition and sing for the Queen, her story - complete with the snorts of laughter and taunts from the audience that were suddenly silenced - has been viewed more than 30 million times on YouTube.
She looks like all of us invisible women.
She is overweight. Her hair is graying. She didn't wear makeup or wax her lip and eyebrows. Her shoes, her dress, even her dark hose, gave new meaning to the description "frumpy." If Susan Boyle ever drew a second look in her life, it was to be ridiculed.
She chose to sing "I Dreamed a Dream" from the score of the musical Les Miserables, a song that is the heartbreaking lament of a woman whose dreams of love and happiness as a young girl have been extinguished by time.
Among the sad lyrics are these: "I had a dream my life would be/ So different from this hell I'm living/ So different now from what it seemed/ Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."
Susan Boyle postponed her dream of singing to return home to care for her ailing mother. But she made the woman a promise, that she would make something of her talent, and after Bridget Boyle died at 91 two years ago, the youngest of her nine children took the brave step of auditioning for Britain's Got Talent, a real meat-grinder of a show.
The notoriously churlish talent judge, Simon Cowell, took one look at her as she walked on stage in front of a Glasgow audience of 3,000, and you could see his barely concealed mockery, and his impatience. He looked like a man who was about to waste three minutes of his wonderful life.
