The other day I was stopped at a red light, when a cyclist whipped around the corner on the other side of the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he was bald (not unusual) not balding, but with no hair at all (also not unusual) and seemed to even be lacking eyebrows (more unusual.) So I turned to look, to see if my peripheral perception had been correct. Of course, that's the point he looked my way and saw me looking at him.
So that made me feel bad. Whether he's fighting cancer, or has some other medical condition, he's surely used to - and sick of - people staring at him. I swear I wasn't staring, but still, from his perspective I was yet another person making him feel like he's on display.
I'm sure I'm not alone in having experienced this before: generally I'm not going to stare at someone, that's impolite. But if a person has some easily-seen physical anomaly, you end up unthinkingly looking their way as soon as you encounter them. And then you force yourself not to look, and I'm sure it's equally obvious to them that you are pointedly not looking at them. I hope that people in that position would understand that seeing people looking their way is not necessarily the result of a person consciously treating them as a spectacle, but I'm sure it's easy to lump us in with people who just don't care.
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