I am looked at every time I show myself. As I only walk around in familiar places, everyone seems to know who I am and what I am in relation to them. The feeling is definitely so good, so good that I have lost a sense of the uncertainty that makes my life what it is.
I am embedded in a place full of gazes; they mold me into what I am and what I am going to be, and the process is unfortunately participatory and voluntary. I must remain under the shadow of the gazes, for if I am not, I would be a nobody—consequently thrown into a deserted place where uncertainty roars and familiarity has sunken into the core of the earth.
My whole life is haunted by the gazes. Life as a whole is a haunted house: every step taken, every breath inhaled, is being looked at—quietly, subtly, but powerfully enough to make you stay vigilant every single minute. I do not know myself, because I am flattened and exposed, like an open source where everyone has a say in it but me. And how does something that’s flattened have an inside? Without an inside, how can one claim to know oneself? It is impossible!