My own person panopticon

I have a crappy living situation in my apartment at school. While I was lucky enough to get the huge single, the drawbacks of it include having another girl have to walk through my room to get to her room every day. Not only that but this girl happens to be the most annoying obnoxious person I've ever had the misfortune of knowing. I really can't stand this person. No one wanted this room. I didn't really have a choice. I thought, I'm pretty easy going, this won't be a huge issue. Well I was sooo wrong.

Thinking of the foucault, I feel like my room is the panopticon. Everything and anything I do in this room at any given time may or may not be on display for others to see. Usually just her, but our housemates feel some (unauthorized) freedom to come and go as they please to her room by walking through my room -- and in reverse, they of course would be completely put off and disheveled if I just burst into their room all the time but ehh. Anyhow, It's so frustrating. Not that I have anything to hide, but I don't like these people that I live with. They are extremely judgemental and not at all my friends. They are in fact people I see on busses and in class that I think oh man I can't stand those people. And woo hoo, I live in a house of them. So the fact that they are constantly moving in and out of my private space, at their will, puts me in an awkard place. When I hear the girl who lives above me, let's call her Janis (yes like from Friends, that level of annoyance), walking up thes tairs into the apartment or down the stairs about to enter my bedroom, I automatically shift whatever I am doing so that I am either pretending to be on the phone or listening to my ipod or i'll even go as far as to change whatever website I am on and pull up an old word document to make it look like i am busy writing a paper just to avoid her. She walks in the room and quietly observes everything. Even if Janice doesnt linger very long, she always glances at my computer screen or the mess on the floor in the corner. It makes me cringe and anxious.

I really don't give a damn what she thinks but it's so hard to not be self-conscious when the one place you are supposed to be out of the public eye, your own private bedroom, is a place where you are under the most scrutiny. I can always be called out on something, I can never say that I am too busy with school work to do something bc she can see if I am watching TV or napping. I can't go out for a night and not come home without inquisitive gazes making judgements or knowing everything i do. Whereas they all live in their own private spaces, and they can do the exact same things I do, and no one will ever know.

I truly feel like a prisoner in my own house. It actually has had physical effects on me to the point where I became ill enough to be medicated and had to start seeing a pyschiatrist to treat my anxiety. I can totally understand the effectiveness of the panopticon having experienced my own version first hand.