The Consequences of Staring

While growing up I was repeatedly told it was rude or wrong to stare at anyone. Naturally, as a child I was curious about other people. I found looking and comparing others to myself gave me a better sense of what kind of people lived in our world. When my mother did catch me staring she would tell me stop and I began to associate the feeling of shame with staring. I had been in and out of the hospital most of my life, which allowed me to be exposed to many different people with diverse illnesses and disabilities. My reason for being in a hospital was not a visible one. I did not find myself being stared at as often as others who had a physical disability or an illness that caused them to look “different”. Due to my curiosity, I found it difficult not to stare at people in the hospital. What happens when the person you are staring at catches you? It has probably happened many times to each of us, but how do we react? Do we feel shame, awkwardness, or trapped?

When I was ten I had to make one of my yearly trips to the hospital. My mother and I had to leave early in order to get blood work done before my appointment. When we arrived into the office there was only one other family sitting in the waiting room. This family was made of a man, woman, and their child. Their child was around my age and she had Down syndrome. She could not talk well and was unable to walk straight up without assistance from her parents. As a ten year old, I had never witness this syndrome up close and could not help but stare. When my mother caught me staring she elbowed me and told me to stop. However, before I could avert my eyes, her eyes locked on to mine. She stood up and began to move in my direction. I felt ashamed that I had been staring at her and now she was coming over to confront me. As she approached me she said hello and told me her name. It was slightly awkward but I responded with a hello and gave her my name. She was extremely polite and our interaction was nothing like I had imaged it would be. I expected her to be upset with me for staring at her, but our short and rather pleasant conversation proved to me that she was just like everyone else. Actually, she was probably friendlier than most people. Through this experience I had learned that it was wrong to judge or stare at a individual who appear different.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s book Staring: How We Look explores a variety of reasons why we stare at other people. She explains one of the reasons we stare is because we wish to understand and analyze the people we see. Furthermore, she comments on how humans tend to rationalize as a way to understand the world around them and often believe that “things and people must fit into preexisting patterns and templates” (30). In other words, we create the average person, which works as the “common denominator against which we are measured” (30). We judge and compare people to what has been culturally constructed as normal or average. Disabled individuals are stared at because they do not fit into the construction of average and we are unable to understand them at first glance.