Week Two Walk Two

For this walk I decided to use an avoidance technique of wearing sunglasses indoors. I went to the Tucson Mall because I wanted to be sure that I would be passing people and outdoors in the summer in Tucson that's never guaranteed.

As I walked into the mall wearing my sunglasses I felt like I was avoiding someone I knew but didn't want to see. There were crowds of people inside but no one was paying me any particular attention. I went into a store and started browsing the racks and this is when I started to feel weird, like people were staring at me. I left the store and started to walk in the mall again, I felt far more comfortable walking in the mall than I had felt browsing in the store. My sunglasses are dark and cover a good portion of my face so they truly feel like a barrier. Walking around inside with them on made everything a purplish hue and I really felt very disconnected from everything that was going on around me. I sat down on a bench for a while and watched the people going by, a little boy asked his mum if I was blind but she hurried him along. That was something unexpected, I know blind people sometimes wear sunglasses but I started to feel like I had wrongfully elicited someones sympathy for a condition I do not have. This made me feel the most uncomfortable of all and I decided to take my sunglasses off.

Repeating my walk of the mall without my sunglasses on I felt much more at ease and found myself actually trying to look people in the eye but unsurprisingly, no one really did - or if our eyes did connect they swiftly looked away. I went into a store again and started to browse the racks, I felt much more at ease this time and didn't feel like anyone was staring at me.

I think I learned that the expectations of society matter more to me now than I ever thought they would when I was a punk kid. I felt uncomfortable from wearing my sunglasses inside because I was worried about what other people would think, when really very few people either noticed or cared.