Pam doesn’t like being noticed. Jim has noticed this. He tries hard not to pay too much attention to the paradox in there—or at least, the paradox generated when you add to that information the fact that he, Jim Halpert, tries to do everything Pam Beesly wants. But Pam doesn’t want to be noticed, and it’s just not in him to do that.
It’s specifically being noticed that she hates: not being seen, or understood, or attended to. When he pays her a compliment (nothing too big, not trying to come onto her, just paying attention, like when her mom gave her new earrings and he told her the opals looked nice) she flushed bright red, but the smiles she darted out from her suddenly-ducked head told him she didn’t mind—she just wasn’t used to it. And the way she says “thank you” when he validates one of her pet peeves, or brings up something she thought she was alone in thinking about the office, tells him that she doesn’t mind when people are on the same wavelength as her, or when they hear the complaints she’s making (even the ones she’s not actually making out loud).
No, Pam hates that moment when everyone’s heads swing around and look at her—which is something his head is doing all the time, only she can’t really see it because his desk faces hers, thank god—and he can tell because she freezes. He used to laugh at the phrase “deer in the headlights” because really, what kind of animal would freeze stock still with four tons of death hurtling towards it at speed? But now he can tell: Pam would. Well, not from an actual car, he’s pretty sure she has a reasonably developed self-protection instinct in that regard, but from the…psychological and metaphorical equivalent of a car in her case: a bunch of eyes. If the room suddenly turns to her—or even if she just thinks it does—she will go stock still.
Jim feels for Pam in this, he really does, but he cannot, at the core of him, understand it. He’s practically the opposite: he seeks attention, smirks at imaginary audiences even when no one is looking, catches any and every eye he can as if to say “did you see what I’m seeing?” When he’s not deliberately attracting notice (and to be fair, there are a lot of times he’s not, he’s not that big an egotist) he just doesn’t care. There’s a book he read a few years back, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with a big animal (“beast,” he remembers it being called, but he’s too lazy to look up the details right now) that believed that “if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.” Jim’s not quite that bad, but he’s in that realm: if he doesn’t notice the eyes on him, they might as well not be there, and if no one is obviously staring at him they might as well not exist. He can’t see them.
Pam doesn’t just see them. She imagines eyes where there aren’t any, living in her own personal Panopticon despite the presence of walls. He’s tried to suggest (as subtly as he can, which when it comes to Pam is actually remarkably subtle) that most people just aren’t that interested in what you’re doing but of course she asked him (him, who cares more about what she’s doing than about his own day to day life) about what she’d been up to earlier that day and he’s incapable of lying to her (by commission at least. Not telling her how he feels is rapidly becoming the biggest lie by omission that he’s ever committed) so he tells her and she thinks she’s proven her point when all she’s really proven is that he, Jim, cares for her, Pam. But not everyone yearns as desperately as he does (he thinks—maybe he’s wrong and everyone else is just as aware of how amazing, how wonderful, how perfectly her she is, but he’s pretty sure only he has truly unlocked this particular secret of the universe). So he’s also pretty sure she’s wrong that everyone’s watching, or really—since she assures him with a laugh that she doesn’t think she’s that interesting (which she’s totally wrong about but whatever)—that everyone’s potentially watching. That they’re all ready to snap their heads over with bugged out eyes at a moment’s notice. They just aren’t. They don’t care that much. Especially their coworkers, who really don’t care at all (except maybe Angela, who loves gossip almost as much as she claims to hate it, and Kelly who will natter on about literally anyone’s personal life if she can, but even they don’t care as much as Pam thinks. He thinks).
It doesn’t really matter, though, because she thinks it, and she’s the one suddenly freezing in his arms at the dojo and icing him out for most of the rest of the day. Because she feels noticed. And he’s really hoping it’s just that, and not that she feels caught. Or maybe (and this makes him feel almost as guilty as thinking about 1Biv) he’s really hoping it is because she feels caught: because if she feels caught, there has to be something she feels she could be caught doing, and the only real candidate is horseplay with him. And that’s only really wrong if she’s thinking what he’s thinking (and even then only because well, she has a fiancé…and they’re in public, which he supposes don’t-notice-me-Pam is probably against as well). But he’s hoping at least that it’s just because she hates being noticed and not because she’s aware of what he was thinking (or of what he could have been thinking, since his actual thoughts surprised even him with their G-rated nature—he wasn’t having dirty thoughts with Pam in his arms, just comfortable and happy ones). Because if she’s freezing him out because she doesn’t want anything to do with the man who would break up her engagement for his own selfish reasons, he’s doomed. There’s no coming back from that because, well, that’s him nailed to a T. But if, just if, she’s freezing him out just because she got noticed, it’ll fade. It’ll be fine. They’ll get past it.
Because just like a deer in the headlights, Pam only freezes for so long.
He hopes.
