I hated mirrors as a kid. Really hated them. When I was about 5, I heard an old-timey radio episode of The Shadow in which the faces of the dead would appear in a spooky ol’ mirror, and from that moment, for 15 years I refused to ever—ever—sleep alone in a room that had a mirror in it.
Now that I’m in my 40s, I’m still not a big fan of mirrors … but not because of any spectral stuff I’d be scared I might see. No, these days, the real “me” I see in the mirror is frightening enough.
Kjerstin Gruys is only 29 years old, but she feels my pain. In 2010 when she was searching for wedding dresses for her upcoming nuptials, she found that constantly gazing at herself in the mirror was kind of, well, depressing. It didn’t help that for years she had struggled with a debilitating eating disorder.
Around that same time, she had read about an order of Renaissance-era nuns who were actually forbidden from looking at themselves in a mirror. And she began to wonder what such a life would look like. She told ABC News:
This idea of living your life experiencing the world for itself instead of constantly reflecting, you know, pun intended, on how you looked. … It was a life where you could get away from yourself.
I just kind of kept coming back to this pattern of perfectionism, and obsessing about my appearance, and I thought, ‘If I can’t think myself out of it, then maybe I need to change something about my environment to force me to change.
And so she did. For a solid year, Gruys avoided mirrors entirely—even on her wedding day. It wasn’t easy, she admits. She had to cover all her bathroom mirrors with towels, and avoiding her own reflection in her car’s rearview mirror was a challenge. She admits that during her first month of the experiment, there was “maybe a 50-50 shot that I had mascara on my nose.”
But by the time Gruys got married, she was no longer worried about how she looked on the big day: She was completely focused on the wedding itself—its significance and beauty, the real meaning of, as she says, “Marrying the love of my life.”
Gruys scrapped her mirrors for a far healthier reason than I scrapped mine back when I was a kid. And it got me thinking a bit about how we look at ourselves—both outside and in.
We live in a very self-reflective age. Almost by necessity, we’re asked to focus on ourselves. We rehash our thoughts and feelings on Facebook and Twitter … a digital examination of ourselves as we run out the door. And as part of our reflective reflex, we measure ourselves against others—often to our detriment. Why don’t I look more like that superstar in the movies? Why are all my Facebook friends having more fun in life than I am? Is there something wrong with me? Am I missing something? It’s not just in the mirror that we see reflections of ourselves. Like those ghostly visages I was always terrified to see when I was little, warped images of ourselves show up along the edges of our mirrors, movies, magazines and social networking messages, and our image of ourselves often suffers by comparison.
Maybe it’d be nice if we could just throw a towel over all this stuff, just like Gruys did. But I don’t think that’s possible, nor even necessarily desirable. Sure, if something’s causing you deep anxiety, maybe it would be advisable to make a quick, clean, break—at least for a while. But maybe the more realistic strategy is not to expunge our media completely, but to recalibrate how we look at it. Everything we see need not bring to mind our own imperfect reflection.
How do we get to that point? Truth be told, I’m not exactly sure. I’m as guilty of those reflective comparisons as anybody. But I suspect there’s a paradox at work here: To get away from these unhealthy comparisons requires, strangely, a bit of honest self reflection, an ability to see ourselves both as who we are and as the beautiful creatures that God sees in us.
It’s so cliché to say that God loves us just as we are, but I think we lose sight of that simple truth sometimes. In our quest to see how we measure up to others, we forget that life isn’t a contest. Very few of us get prizes for washboard abs or charming Facebook posts. Sure, when we look in the mirror—whether it be a literal, physical mirror or one that reflects our thoughts and feelings—we see areas where we can improve. We’re always growing, always in the process of becoming something more than what we are. But that shouldn’t obscure the beautiful beings we are now.
Next time I look in the mirror, I’ll try not to be bothered by my receding hairline or slightly expanding paunch. I’ll try not to hold my current reflection up to who I was 10 or 20 years ago, or wonder why I wasn’t blessed with Johnny Depp-style genes.
Instead, I hope to see a bit of the person that God sees—and someone who hopefully, in turn, reflects just a tiny bit of God’s goodness to the folks around me.
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