A friend recently told me that they described me to someone on campus, someone who I’d never met, as “the girl who wears blush,” and it gave me pause.
It is true that I wear bright pink blush regularly, but somehow hearing myself described this way by a stranger reminded me that I am mostly perceived using information that I didn’t intend to give away. I didn’t mean for you to think of me at all, but you’ve already done it.
As a transfer student from a much larger campus, I feel especially aware of my visibility at Oxy. Oxy’s student population is around 2,000. In comparison, I transferred from a large STEM research school whose Fall 2022 enrollment was a staggering 14,148. It was also a commuter school where people more or less go to their classes and go home right after.
Coming to Oxy, I was struck by how people seem to linger everywhere. I felt right away like this school has this deep gravitational center that draws everyone toward its core, tightly clustered together; walking around, you’ll see friend groups who display their allegiance by dressing similarly, sprawling out in the grass or throwing a frisbee near the heads of passersby.
After a few weeks on campus, I noticed that I saw a lot of the same people every single day. At my old school, it was rare to bump into people at this frequency outside of class, but here I often find myself participating in this sort of casual watchfulness. I introduce myself to someone with the secret knowledge that I already know who they are by virtue of existing in proximity to one another.
What results from this little fishbowl of a campus is the blossoming of plot lines, threadbare but vivid, about the people I see on a daily basis: the sweet, smart boy in my film class often goes back to his dorm after getting breakfast; the girl who uses a purse as a backpack is friends with someone who smokes cigarettes on the Quad but never finishes them. I think a person in my friend’s class is dating a girl on the soccer team, and when I see them lean into each other on a bench I feel like I am a part of their lives for a moment.
It might be narcissistic to assume that anyone is as invested in my life as I am in theirs, and maybe it’s more realistic to say that I am especially prone to observation, but bearing witness to the lives of my fellow students is so awkwardly intimate in a markedly mundane way. I’ve been warned by many current Oxy students about being careful who I form relationships with and what note I end these relationships on, and I am now starting to understand what they mean. If there’s someone you don’t want to see, there they are, sitting right where you were going to eat lunch.
The constant surveillance splinters me into different versions of myself. Something about knowing a million tiny acquaintances will see me for just a moment doing the smallest thing — reaching down into my bag and pulling out a banana, or stopping to pant and heave walking up the hill to Norris — and ascribe to it a meaning attached to their perception of me. It knocks the wind out of me a little. When I bob my head in my headphones listening to a song I like, I wonder if anyone is looking at me and wondering what song is playing.
The other morning I was driving to 7-Eleven and made a precarious, spacey left turn when two girls walked out in the crosswalk right in front of my car. My face took on an incredibly distressed expression and I emphatically mouthed “I’m sorry” to them before driving away and feeling like I narrowly escaped becoming a manslaughter headline. I was terrified this would become a prolific reflection on my character, but then I peered in my rearview mirror and saw the two laughing to each other. I realized I’d already become just a story to them, and it made me feel like the fog cleared a little over everything.
Far from terrified, I’m glad to have become part of the mythology of their friendship. It reminds me that I’m never exempt from participating in the world, and what a miracle it is that I have no choice but to live and be lived with. I hope people on campus hear me oversharing to make my friends laugh and tell their friends about the weird girl in the library who was banned from the mall. I hope I make people whose names I’ll never know laugh. Being watched means I am seen, even when I don’t know it — I hope I never find out.
Contact Beatrice Irwin at birwin@oxy.edu
I love this article! Beautifully written and a fresh yet familiar perspective.