Eyes that never blink

There are people who don’t look at you — they watch you.

And there’s a difference.

Looking is human. Watching is something else. It’s that strange hunger that lingers in the shadows of civility — quiet, but not kind. You can feel it in the silence between “how are yous” and the hollow click of a like that doesn’t mean I see you, but rather I’m keeping count.

Watching, always watching — not out of care or curiosity, but calculation.

They say envy is a mirror held by the weak.

But no one warns you what it’s like to live under its gaze.

There’s something profoundly unnerving about being perceived through someone else’s unfinished wounds. You become a reflection of everything they buried — their doubts, their failed chances, the versions of themselves they gave up on.

And still, they watch.

Not because they care who you are, but because they cannot bear that you’ve become something they didn’t have the courage to imagine for themselves.

It’s not hatred, exactly.

It’s fascination soaked in bitterness.

An obsession with your becoming — because deep down, they never believed you were allowed to.

You start to carry yourself differently when you feel the weight of invisible eyes. Every decision becomes a performance, every silence a question mark they’ll answer without you. You begin to edit yourself. Less light. Less joy. Less you. Not because you fear them — but because some primal part of you remembers what it felt like to be devoured by judgment masquerading as concern.

But the real question is this: 

Who are you when no one is watching? Or worse — who are you when everyone is?

There is no manual for this kind of quiet war. No script for navigating a world where people clap with one hand while digging with the other. You learn to carry your name like a shield. You learn to build small sanctuaries inside yourself, places they cannot enter, cannot ruin. You stop offering explanations to those who never asked in good faith.

And in time, you realize:

Their watching has nothing to do with you.

It’s a conversation they’re having with their own ghosts.

You just happen to be the background or screen it’s projected on.

So let them peer in. Let them draw conclusions you never wrote. Let them fill the silence with stories that say more about them than you. Because the truth is: what they hate in you is not your flaws — it’s your refusal to collapse.

Your quiet resilience.

Your audacity to exist unapologetically.

Your choice to no longer make yourself smaller just to fit their comfort.

You are not here to be digestible.

Not here to be palatable, safe, or pleasing.

You are here to be whole. And sometimes, that will terrify people who’ve only ever known themselves in fragments.

Let them watch.

You have nothing to prove — only yourself to become