Floating Heads
Growing Up Under Surveillance and Shame in 90s Romania
I. The Walls
90s Romania. People lived close to each other, but contrary to expectation, that closeness didn’t make us intimate. It made us feel surveilled, under the constant lens of others’ gaze.
Growing up in a communist apartment block neighborhood was a paradoxical experience. Everyone washed their dirty linen in private, of course, but they left it to dry in public. Laundry waved on balconies like flags of surrender: surrender to others’ mercy, commentary, and harsh judgment.
The apartments had thin walls. Everything was overheard: arguments, movies, appliances turning on, toilets flushing, someone mumbling something downstairs. Life there had its own, collective soundscape. Neighbors didn’t need to ask what happened inside your home - they overheard it, learned it from others if they missed it, and commented anyway. If an argument was too loud, they communicated passively - by hitting a radiator, letting you know they were unwilling participants in your fight, breaking the spell of privacy.
This closeness could have been warm, even kind. But it wasn’t. Kindness was not so common after the fall of the communist regime. Suspicion was. That’s why more often, the closeness meant something else entirely: you lived under watch. In the 90s, it wasn’t the state that watched you anymore, but your neighbor, the invisible morality of the stairwells and kitchens. This was the communist residue, embedded in the reality of the apartment blocks.
There were always eyes somewhere, even when you didn’t see them.
II. The Dance
On October 1st, 1992, Michael Jackson had a concert in Bucharest, part of The Dangerous Tour. It was an event of huge significance for Romania. I was 3 years, 1 month, and 12 days old. It was filmed by HBO and broadcast on October 10th: it broke HBO ratings records and was seen in over 60 countries. I don’t remember it at all.
But a few years later, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson. I was struck by the beat, the pulse, and especially the choreography. It truly felt like lightning. Smooth Criminal was my favorite. Of course, I didn’t understand it; I was around 5 or 6 when I listened to it. I just felt the rhythm, something electric moving through him, and that something passed through me as well.
We all tried dancing like him, and most of us tried to mimic his moonwalk. My friend and I jumped around the living room, taking turns trying the moonwalk, though it never worked on Romanian carpets. There’s no room without carpets or curtains in our Romanian Universe (but this Romanian horror vacui is a theme in itself, maybe for another essay).
But there was another move I simply loved. It was fast, electrified, iconic. The pelvic grab. Michael Jackson would grab himself, a burst of energy reminding everyone that the body was part of the performance.
I loved that move. Without thinking, I copied it - again and again, proudly, my hand exactly where I thought it should be.
Then suddenly, my friend stopped dancing and stared at me.
“What did you do?! Where did you put your hand?”
Her face was confused, entertained, slightly amused - as if I’d crossed a boundary I didn’t even know existed - but now she had the upper hand.
She said she would tell my mom. She laughed, but I felt it wasn’t a joke.
I was instantly scared. Not because I understood the gesture. Not because I thought it was sexual - I didn’t know what “sexual” meant.
I only knew something was wrong and that I had done it.
And in that moment, shame arrived.
That was the moment the body stopped being innocent. I learned that the body could betray you. That someone can name what you are doing and make it dangerous.
III. Surveillance
I was told by another friend my age that babies appeared if you kissed a boy on the mouth. A simple, innocent kiss. That was my first sexual education lesson.
Looking back, my parents barely factored into that moment; they didn’t explain things. You learned through punishment, embarrassment, and things left unspoken. You figured out something was wrong but never realized why. I don’t remember learning about sex as something people did. But I remember learning that something about bodies was dangerous, inappropriate - even in play, but especially in joy.
It was the neighbourhood that raised us - or disciplined us. The community was a single organism, made up of eyes, mouths, and opinions. People on staircases commented on your clothes, your hair, your posture, and your behavior. Our bodies weren’t ours - they were watched, judged, corrected.
Years later, the same lesson returned - this time spoken by an adult. A neighbour remarked that I’d been stung by two bees: my breasts were starting to show. It was the same gesture as before. My body named out loud, placed in public, and no longer mine. My cheeks are flushing with shame even now when I recall that moment.
It wasn’t ideological surveillance, though communism trained people in it. It felt like social surveillance. Neighbors questioned why you were out too late. They evaluated how your parents raised you and weren’t shy about reporting it. Old grandmothers, bored mothers, unemployed fathers watching from balconies - they were the rules enforcers.
You behaved because someone might see.
And if someone saw, they might talk.
And if they talked, your parents would hear.
Behaviour was not dictated by ethics, but by fear of exposure. “People talk” was the most common phrase you would hear adults say.
Most of us learned to hide parts of ourselves long before we understood what those parts even were.
IV. The Floating Head
I sometimes think of girlhood, especially in post-communist Romania, as a training in becoming a floating head. A split between mind and body that comes from seeing yourself through the eyes of others - a split that makes you overthink before every move, be mindful of posture, be polite, quiet and proper.
Your body followed you; it wasn’t something you belonged to.
You carried yourself as if someone else owned the rights to you.
I don’t remember feeling like a physical person until much later - late adolescence, maybe even early adulthood - when suddenly the body arrived, like a stranger knocking. But by then, shame had already gotten to me.
In Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger gives voice to this inner separation and makes it universal.
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”1
What helped me reconcile with my body later was picking up sports as an adult, especially swimming. When I first started swimming, it felt as if my body and mind were two separate, out-of-focus images, finally merged. Until then, I often skipped physical education classes, and went to the library instead. It felt much safer being in my head than in my body.
Writing and sharing these reflections has been part of that journey too. If you find yourself moved by this, you can support my work by buying me a coffee - a small gesture that helps me keep writing from this place of honesty and curiosity.
V. The Residue
Even now, I notice how quickly shame reaches me. There are still times when my body feels watched, as if presence required permission. At times, I move through my body as if through a rented space, careful and not fully at home.
This didn’t happen because I disliked my body, but because I learned fear before knowledge. A fear enforced casually, through glances, remarks, and gossip.
This is what such closeness leaves behind: not belonging, but self-surveillance. We learned shame before we learned ourselves. We belonged to others before we belonged to our own bodies. We were watched long before we were ever truly seen.
Writing this has helped me recognize the mechanisms I learned to survive being watched: anticipation, self-correction, and the instinct to police myself before anyone else could. They once kept me safe. Now, they are no longer useful.
What followed was simply permission: to be present, to be wrong, to take up space without rehearsing how I might be perceived. To stop living as a floating head, and to allow myself - both in mind and body - to be fully alive.
Seen yourself here? Or discovered a new way of seeing? Share it—others might find it helpful too.
Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972.