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Many gay men grow up developing a quiet skill: reading the room. Measuring how much to show, when to keep quiet, how not to make anyone uncomfortable, which gesture might put their safety at stake. It is a fine watchfulness, learned early, almost always necessary. The problem is not that it exists. The problem is that, over the years, it stops switching off: the watchman who began by looking out for us from outside ends up installed within.

A watchfulness that began outside

Let’s say it plainly: this watchfulness is not paranoia. It is born of a real danger. In hostile settings —a family, a school, a small town— anticipating rejection is an intelligent defense, sometimes indispensable. The child who learns to hide is not sick; he is surviving. Recognizing this matters, because it lifts the blame from a mechanism that, at its origin, protected.

When the guard stays on

But the guard does not always understand that the danger has passed. Even when the surroundings change —even when there is no longer a threat—, the watchfulness keeps operating, now from within. It becomes one’s own eye, appraising every gesture: «don’t show that», «not like that», «they’ll think something». The «what will they say», which at first was a voice from outside, is internalized until it sounds like one’s own. And then one censors oneself, anticipates a rejection that perhaps no one is going to produce anymore, and lives correcting oneself before a court that is no longer in the room.

The cost

That watchman charges a price. It wears you out —being on guard all the time is exhausting. It tightens the chest, steals sleep, disguises as anxiety what is, deep down, a relentless self-demand. And above all, it makes the most intimate thing difficult: it is hard to truly let yourself be seen by another when a part of you is still standing guard. The bond asks you to lower your watch, and the guard will not allow it.

Telling the voice apart

The work is not to become reckless or to deny that, sometimes, care is still needed. It is subtler: learning to tell when the voice warns of a real danger and when it is only repeating an old fear. Giving the watchman a name, tracing where it took its tone from —whose voice that is—, and finding out, little by little, that you can show yourself more without the world falling apart. It is not quick and there is no formula; it is a work of elaboration. But as the voice becomes recognizable, it stops giving orders blindly.

Telling the watchman apart from yourself is, perhaps, one of the most freeing tasks of this process. It is not about throwing it out —we owe it something—, but about relieving it of a shift that no longer applies. And in that margin that opens up, one can finally begin to inhabit a life less watched over and more one’s own.

Carlos Hernán Arango Botero — Psychologist