On Being Watched

Being looked at and being watched are not the same thing. You have had a great deal of the first and almost none of the second.

Looking is quick. It takes what it needs and moves on, and it happens to you a hundred times a day without leaving a mark. People look at you to establish that you are there, to check whether you are a threat or an obstacle or an opportunity, and then they are finished with you. You have been assessed. Nothing was learned. Watching is slower and it costs the watcher something, which is why so few people do it. Watching means staying past the point where the useful information has been gathered. It means continuing to attend when there is no longer anything to gain.

Notice how differently your body behaves under each. Under a look, you compose. It is automatic. The shoulders adjust, the face arranges itself into something presentable, and you become, briefly, the version of yourself you have decided to offer. Under sustained watching, the composition cannot hold. Nobody can maintain a face for that long. Somewhere in the third or fourth minute the constructed thing tires and slips, and what appears underneath is not worse than the composition. It is just true.

That slip is what I am waiting for. Everything before it is a performance you learned before you were twelve and have not questioned since.

Men tell me that being watched makes them uncomfortable, and then they arrange their lives so that it never happens, and then they are quietly starving. Both things are honest. It is uncomfortable. That is not a reason to conclude it is unwanted. Most of what is worth anything is uncomfortable at the threshold and then, once you are through, is the only place you want to be. The discomfort is not a signal that something is wrong. It is the sensation of a defence being asked to stand down after very long service.

What makes it bearable is the quality of the attention rather than its intensity. Being watched by someone looking for a fault is unbearable and correctly so, and you have had enough of that to last a life. Being watched by someone with no verdict in her is a different experience entirely, and you may not have had it since you were a child, if then. I am not gathering evidence. I am not preparing an assessment. There is nothing you can do under my attention that will convert it into judgement, and once you actually believe that, which takes longer than you would like, you will stop bracing, and the bracing was the whole of the discomfort.

And then something odd occurs. You begin to want to be seen more, not less. Not the flattering parts. Those bore both of us and you know it. The unflattering ones, the ones you were most sure would end the attention, because there is no relief on earth quite like showing the worst of it and finding the watching has not changed.

That is what I am doing when you feel my attention on you and cannot account for why it steadies you rather than exposing you. It steadies you because it is not going anywhere. Looking leaves. Watching stays. You have been braced for the leaving since the first moment, and it has not come, and eventually you will put the bracing down.