Shadows of the Mind

The Weight of their Eyes

The Weight of Their Eyes

I’ve always been afraid of the weight of their eyes. It’s not the words they say, not even the whispers behind my back that make me feel small; it’s the silence in between. That silence—where I imagine the judgments they’re forming in their minds—has the power to crush me more than any insult ever could.

It starts the moment I step outside, a suffocating awareness that everyone is watching, analyzing, and measuring me against some invisible standard I’ll never meet. I can feel it in the way they glance at me when I walk into a room, the way their eyes linger for just a second too long. It’s in the way they smile, the slight upward curve of their lips that doesn’t quite reach their eyes, a smile that feels more like a question than a greeting: *Who are you to be here?*

I know it’s irrational. I tell myself that no one cares as much as I think they do, that they’re too busy worrying about their own lives to really focus on mine. But logic doesn’t help when the fear is clawing at the inside of my chest, making it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to exist.

Every word I speak, every move I make, feels like a test. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I do something embarrassing? I replay every conversation in my head, dissecting it for mistakes, for reasons they might think less of me. Did I laugh too loud? Did I come across as stupid? Do they think I’m weird?

I wish I could disappear, fade into the background where no one would notice me. But even that isn’t safe. If I’m too quiet, too withdrawn, they’ll think I’m strange, an outcast. If I try too hard to fit in, they’ll see through me, see the desperation in my eyes, the fear that underlies every forced smile.

And so I’m trapped, constantly balancing on a tightrope between invisibility and exposure, knowing that one wrong step could send me tumbling down, shattering whatever fragile sense of acceptance I’ve managed to build.

I envy those who move through life without this constant burden, who speak and act without worrying about the consequences, who seem so free. I want to be like them, to feel comfortable in my own skin, to laugh without hearing the echo of judgment in my mind.

But for now, I’ll continue to live in the shadows of their eyes, hiding behind a mask of indifference, pretending that their opinions don’t matter, even as they weigh me down like a chain I can never break.

—Lady_Perrila