I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

I lay in my bed and with shaky fingers typed the words, “always feel like I’m being watched” + “mental illness” into the search bar. I had begun to believe that I was suffering from some form of paranoia or schizophrenia. I had been thinking about it for weeks, terrified of even searching for it because I didn’t want it to be recorded in my search history. I realized that I was performing all the time as though people were watching me, as though people had placed cameras in my home and I was being monitored. Clearly I was having a psychotic break. But this feeling was everywhere. Not just in my home, but on my phone, in public, on the bus.

I cannot escape the overwhelming feeling that I am always being watched. But this didn’t come out of nowhere, and I think it has a lot to do with our modern society.

Arriving at any hotel, I have a ritual—a check that I go through in each room, from the front to the back, before I can settle in. First, I take the luggage rack out of the closet and place it at the end of my bed. I check the inside and the outside of the closet for anything that looks like a camera. I turn the lights off and close the blinds, scanning the room for any red lights that are out of place. The only thing I should see is the fire alarm. I run my fingers along the TV and try to see if I can feel any external wires or something on the top that feels like a lens. When I’m in the bathroom, I put my finger to the mirror; if the reflection of my fingers touches, that means the mirror is two-way. I check the showerhead for anything that could be a camera and check around the toilet. Once I’m satisfied, I can relax—to a certain extent. Every day that I return to my hotel room, I do the check all over again, just in case someone had been to my room while I was out.

I can’t explain exactly when this started. Maybe it was the upskirt photos I saw on the internet of unknown girls in middle school. At a certain time, when the internet was in its infancy and there were few guardrails, many porn sites would allow things that today would be considered a crime. Upskirt photos of girls taken on flip phones were my absolute nightmare—the idea that somewhere on the internet was a picture of me, unbeknownst to me, maybe even in the bathroom, being used by adult men for jerking off made me ill. Of course, the responsibility went to women. Learn to watch your surroundings! Listen for the sound of a shutter! Wear a sweater around your waist! It was my duty to maintain constant vigilance, to make sure the menfolk stay in line. So I learned the tips: how to spot a hidden camera, a two-way mirror, a microphone; how to tell if your drink has been spiked; and watch, watch, watch everyone around me. But then the surveillance became more intense. The panopticon started to feel like it wasn’t just when I was outside, but also in my home. I put a piece of black tape on my laptop camera so it couldn’t be turned on remotely. I turned off Siri so she couldn’t record all my conversations and send me targeted ads. I’m getting a VPN, and my friends and I all talk on Signal now. There are no safe spaces.

My new fear is going viral—of being caught being human in public, and it being posted online for mockery. My heart races with the idea that I could be out behaving like a cringy, imperfect human being and my face becomes the new meme du jour. I come home to a thousand texts about how I’m all over TikTok in a video that has millions of views. When I am out in public, I am “on.” The stage is set, the curtains are drawn. I am in performance mode. I am not a human being. Everything I do is measured and filtered through the idea of, “Does this look or sound stupid?” “Am I being cringe?”

How long can I keep this up? Were we meant to live like this?

When I was younger, my Nana gave me a piece of advice: “No one is thinking of you as much as you think they are.” This set off a conflict of emotions in me. At once, it relieved me of the burden of having to be perfect—because no one cared about me—but no one cared about me? That didn’t seem right. I noticed people all the time. I am on constant guard, noticing the distance between myself and them, trying to gauge whether or not this person means me harm or is just a weirdo. This is what we ask of girls, because one slip and we look at her. “Why weren’t you more careful?”

The urge to move out into the middle of the woods or wear an EMP device on me at all times is strong. We weren’t meant to live like this. I know it. As Palantir lengthens its claws into more facets of our personal and private life, Ring doorbells capture every single move we make, and the tracking device I keep on me at all times snitches on my every behavior, I acquiesce. What can I do? (Besides the Kaczynski method) I think of more ways to disconnect. The phone and I are spending less time together. I have unsubscribed from many major entertainment platforms and do not plan to go back. I spend time at the library, I buy used books, I listen to music on vinyl. This may feel a bit pretentious, but I don’t do it for the attention or the congratulatory acknowledgment. I’m reconnecting with myself. This modern world has boxed me in, and I feel claustrophobic. The internet once promised me that I could go anywhere, see anything, and now it has locked me in my home.

So I have technologically regressed. I no longer hope for new technology; in fact, I abhor it. I’m always trying to find new ways to “dumb down” my living. Simplify. Refine. No I don’t need a toaster that links to my phone. No I don’t need a ring that will vibrate when I’m about to have my period. No I don’t need a light bulb that knows what time I come home at night. I don’t think the feelings of paranoia will go away, especially because I think they are justified. How does one cure a reasonable delusion? I think I will learn to evade, to conceal, how to hide away parts of myself from the all-seeing eye, the gathering maw of information, and keep a bit of me all for myself. I think that some things won’t go online. Some things stay whispered to a friend in the back of a crowded bar or movie theater, slightly misheard but completely understood. Some things that will fade, never remembered. Never seen by anyone.

And I prefer it that way.