This fixation of yours – this eye-fixation, do you think it’s normal?

I would argue not.

I would understand if you began to sweat upon realizing your professor was eyeing you to answer a question in class over course material you hadn’t read. Damn near anyone could empathize if you were hyper aware of the gaze of your beloved. If being in their epicenter caused a radiating warmth from your cheeks to your chest, caused a wriggle in your gut and hesitancy in your action, very few could criticize you.

However.

Your behavior is suspect, at least.

I’ve watched the way you twitch at the flex of an eyelid. You wind yourself ever tighter any time an errant gaze passes your way. There are divots in your palm from where you dig in your finger nails. You retract within yourself a bit more every moment – the second you cease to be alone in a room, you retract. Bodily moving yourself into a corner, tucking in your fists, pulling those within your sleeves, ducking your head. Somehow, despite all your avoidance of them, you remain so hyper aware of the movements of those eyes around you.

God, but you’re sensitive, aren’t you?

Why do you interpret every slight movement as a threat against your person? Why are you so quick to assume the worst of an action?

When your classmate stepped on the back of your shoe, you were quick to remove yourself from his path and glare at him as he passed you by. When your desk neighbor knocked your papers off the tabletop with the edge of her backpack, you immediately knew it was on purpose, that she was laughing at you, that her friends were watching from somewhere, that if you accepted her apology it would be playing into their games – oh God would they get such a good laugh out of your ignorance of their mind games.

It must be so exhausting, reading into everyone’s every breath like you do.

Have you considered the option that they are living their lives in a similar manner? Most of their actions are guided by the opinion of others, much like you. Contrary to what your anxieties tell you, their actions have motivations outside of ruining your life.

Who hurt you so, to make you such a coiled mess, to be such a volatile creature? It must be dizzying to live on that merry-go-round – that self-fulfilling paranoia.

But I suppose that’s none of my business. It’s not like you’d listen to me, anyways. Any concern an outsider’s behalf would feel like an intrusion to you. More than that, it would feel like humiliation.

You’ve always known that “they” were watching you, critiquing you, waiting for you to fail.

Who even is this mythical “they” that you’re always thinking of? You use that word in your thoughts so consistently, as if you knew that all outsiders were a part of some hive mind. You fall so effortlessly into the thought process of social binary – truly believing that life is meant to be you versus the other. Not only this, but you assume that every other person subscribes to that same mindset.

You see yourself as the ultimate victim. You are the ultimate villain.

Look at you go – deciding the guilt of the masses. Before a word has left their lips, you’ve written “GUILTY” across their foreheads. You decided their ill intent, and regardless of their actions, you have dismissed them as the enemy. Do you ever think about how many people you have alienated as a result of this thought process?

You have always felt like you were alone.

Your shyness made you an island. Your words came out jumbled. You never seemed to laugh at the right times. You were always making too much or too little eye contact. You were awkward, you were young – before you became the mess that you are, that’s what you were – a lonely child.

Would you like to know a secret?

Some of those “others”, those anonymous clusters of eyes and sounds, they are lonely children as well. Maybe they pushed that part of them down until it was invisible to the outside eye. Maybe they’ve stopped trying to “fix” themselves for society. But there are those who still hurt as you hurt.

And you’re hurting them, still.

Rather than using your heartaches to gain sympathy, look kindly on potential comrades in quiet, you alienate them. You reaffirm their thoughts of themselves – those same thoughts which echo in your mind every day –

Worthless, worthless, pathetic, weak, coward, mousy, awkward, worthless, weak, gross, coward.

You become, to them, that same evil that you so despise in your peers. You ensure silence in a crowd, and screaming in the mind.

I know -

This isn’t something you think about too often. It is not intentional. But isn’t that part of the problem?

Isn’t that something you hate about those “others”? How they “only ever think of themselves”? In your hurry to defend yourself from their selfishness, did you miss the hypocrisy?

You don’t have to seal yourself away like this. There is no writer in the sky, no deep-voiced narrator dictating your actions. This prison is one that you have made for yourself.

You can let yourself out of it, too.