"Do not perceive me" means, roughly: I am still here, I am still functioning, but I would prefer that no one look at me while I do it. It is not a request to be left alone forever. It is a request for a temporary exemption from being seen, the social equivalent of a cat getting into a box that is clearly too small and deciding the matter is settled.
Where the phrase came from
Like most phrases of its kind, it has no single author. "I do not wish to be perceived" and its variants spread through Tumblr and Twitter somewhere around the turn of the 2020s, usually attached to a photograph of an animal hiding badly. It said something a lot of people apparently needed said: that there is a difference between wanting solitude and simply being tired of having a face.
The phrase outlived the usual meme lifespan, which tells you it was never really a joke.
The philosophical footnote
There is, inconveniently, a whole philosophy of this. Sartre devotes a long section of Being and Nothingness to what he calls the look: the moment another person sees you, and you stop being the center of your own situation and become an object inside theirs. His example is a man caught at a keyhole. Alone, he is simply looking. The instant footsteps sound in the hall, he acquires a shape he did not choose and cannot argue with. Sartre treats this as one of the fundamental structures of existing alongside other people, not as an unpleasant mood.
He wrote several hundred pages about it. The internet compressed it to five words and a photograph of an opossum in a trash can. Both approaches are valid. One is shorter.
Why it is always an opossum
The meme needed an avatar, and humans were disqualified, because a person hiding looks tragic while an animal hiding looks like policy. Hence the recurring cast:
- The opossum. The patron creature. An animal whose entire defensive strategy is to become unperceivable on short notice, up to and including impersonating the dead. Total commitment.
- The cat in the sink, the basket, the gap behind the curtain. Proof that the desire not to be perceived coexists comfortably with sitting in the middle of the kitchen.
- The moth. Flattened against a wall, holding perfectly still, operating on the theory that stillness is invisibility. The theory is wrong. The moth does not know that.
- The frog in the drain. No notes. The frog has solved it.
Each of these creatures does openly what people do politely: exist slightly out of frame, on purpose.
From the archive
We keep a full wing of such specimens (opossums under cars, cats in sinks, moths mid-denial) in the Do Not Perceive Me collection, documented on garment-dyed shirts for those who understand the request from the inside. The most committed marsupials have their own Opossum Shirts file. The broader population of anxious creatures lives in Creatures. The opossum's own version of the manoeuvre, which is involuntary rather than chosen, is documented in Opossum Playing Dead.
Sources
- Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. Part Three, Chapter One, “The Look.” The keyhole example and the account of becoming an object in another person's world. Internet Archive record.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Jean-Paul Sartre”. Secondary summary of the look and of being-for-others, for anyone who would rather not read the several hundred pages.