No One Has to Be Watching: The Experience of Self-Surveillance

Isn't self-surveillance is exhausting? I feel compelled to monitor myself almost constantly. So I am not only having the experience, I also have opinions about it. Critiquing it, narrating it, judging it, judging me. It's like I have several fussy assistants hovering over me at all times. They're like gnats.

I was talking to a dear friend the other day who is also sober. She is struggling with a different compulsion now, it's drinking but in a different shape. It amazes me how this is what quitting drinking is like- you quit drinking, but the compulsion itself is much harder to quit. And sometimes hard to even identify. There's the behavior, there's the compulsion that drives the behavior. It feels like it's about the behavior, but it's really about what's driving the behavior. Basic cause and effect, but shape-shifting and slippery.

It makes me think that the compulsion is also the regulation itself. It's the habit of survival. Mechanical. Pathological?

This fall and winter have been a time of deep inner turnover for me, the sharp plow of self searching dug in and turned over dense clods of inner me that have not been exposed to the air. They appeared because they were found, not forced. It has felt like I am doing actual growing, not through the compulsion of self-surveillance as regulation, but through sensing my lived experience. It's relational. Without habit. Alive.

When I'm in the woods, I often wonder what it's like to be a tree, living a life that's not painfully micro-managed. Imagine! To grow and fan out and stand up and bend in the wind and get wet in the rain, all without a running commentary. I often stop, gaze at the moss just mossing and I envy the ease. A rock, being a rock. A squirrel runs by, scurries and leaps and it looks so unencumbered, so present, so...unsupervised.

I stay with that sense of ease. Linger.

Trying to separate experience itself from monitoring experience is tricky. I am a well-trained watcher with a lifetime of hypervigilance perfecting under my belt. I am too good at reading the room, too good at the cover up. Too good at the fluffing things up, keeping the peace, filling in the cracks and thinking before I speak. Sometimes it feels like I am mostly overseeing myself living my own life, like watching someone ride a bike on TV. How can you learn to ride a bike just by watching it on TV? When do I get on a bike? Why don't I do it?

Separating myself from my experience has been critical at times, it's been survival. But survival is not relational. Survival is compulsive. Being driven to live, even when I couldn't stand being alive, makes sense as a way of life. A way of life that sticks around even when the need to operate in survival mode is long gone.

I think about what motivates us as humans a lot. And not in a "I need to find a reason" way, more in an "Isn't this interesting" one. I often wonder, what makes us tick? I have a deep longing to inhabit the dynamic, the full complexity of being human, even as culture and society shove the notion of uniformity down my throat and call it ethical. How did we agree to let order, over functioning, and performative busyness bury the intricate experience of being alive? And is that what drives us to find substitutes for feeling alive? Oh, I can’t do the living, so I guess I’ll find ways to pretend I’m alive? Like...I produce, therefore I live?

Living has been turned into a product. Something we must improve, get better at. Is that really possible? What if we take away the optimization, the living your best life, could life actually just get lived on its own? Not because we are managing it, but because we are present to it? Not for better or for worse, but for now.

I'm really interested in the way self-surveillance pretends to be synonymous with growth. It's the if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there does it make a sound thing. If I am not monitoring my own life am I actually living?

This is in no way a how to, an instruction, or a reason why. It's a wondering, a sharing of what I've been turning over in my own field over the past several months. The ground that needed air was the ground that was suffocated by the compulsion to make life better, productive, best. That aerated ground is my humanity, it is my senses, not I think therefore I am but I sense therefore I live.

I lose some of the hovering fussy assistants somewhere along the way.

Maybe no one has to always be watching?

I find myself sensing more and more, without the compulsion to change, control, fix, be better, get best. It feels unsettling in a way that is exciting and also troubling. Can I trust this aliveness? What if I'm not watching myself all the time? What will happen? What will I do? Who will I be?

I don't know.