Why You Should Spend Less Time Looking in the Mirror
By: Antony Pinol
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Self, Mirror, Self Help

For the past few months, I’ve tried everything to get rid of an unusual red rash that has placed its self on the top of my lip. Numerous visits to the doctor and several prescribed creams later, the rash is still there and I’m still annoyed. The latest hypothesis from my doctor is that it might be ‘Perioral Dermatitis’, so I’m slathering some antibiotic cream on it every day in the hope that I’m not amongst the unlucky few for whom this skin condition “may become chronic”.

If my rash does become a long-term issue, I’m going to have to learn to cope a lot better with the frustration I feel every morning when I look at myself in my bathroom mirror. The red, angry bumps jump out at me and give me the impression that it’s the only thing that people will see when they look at me. Once I’ve fixated on this unsightly rash for a few minutes, I begin to notice all the other flaws on my face — the dark bags that hang under my eyes, the brown stains on my teeth, and the oily pimples hiding in the creases of my nose. Needless to say, looking in the mirror hasn’t been an enjoyable process for me these past few months.

The thing is, despite what my mirror’s lead me to believe, numerous friends have told me that my rash is barely noticeable — they hadn’t even been aware of its presence until I drew their attention to it. Maybe they’re just being nice, but I’ve known my friends for too long for them to feel worried about offending my sensibilities. I’m inclined to think that my friends are right and that my mirror’s been misleading me — it hasn’t been giving me an accurate picture of the true me.

What a mirror can’t capture

My mum was diagnosed with a chronic eye-condition several years ago, a side-effect of which is that one her eyes droop shut slightly more than the other (it’s called ‘amblyopia’ apparently). My mum has mentioned this unfortunate consequence of her condition on numerous occasions, but I’d never noticed it, until the other day when we were both stood in front of the mirror by our front-door getting ready to leave the house and I looked at my mum, in the mirror, and there it was — one eye was shut slightly more than the other.

I’d never noticed my mum’s eye issue when I was looking at her face-to-face because my mum is more than just her eyes, or her face, or even her whole physical body. When I look at my mum, there are so many different factors that contribute to my perception of her — the mood she is in, the energy she is giving off, all my memories of her, what she says, maybe what she smells like — none of which I can see when I look at her reflection in a mirror.

When we look into a mirror, the reflection staring back at us is actually an incredibly simplistic and reductive portrayal of who we are. I know that the mirror by my front door can’t show me the kindness, love, and compassion that I see in my mum every day when I look at her, all I see in the mirror is her physicality and that’s not even half of the story.

Even on a physical level, it has been shown that a mirror doesn’t always provide us with an accurate depiction of that which is in front of it — the size, color, and proportions of what a mirror shows us can all be affected by the lighting that surrounds the mirror, our proximity to the mirror, and the size of the mirror itself. Given this evident inaccuracy, we shouldn’t feel the need to attach too much importance to what it shows us, for better or for worse. For all I know, my bathroom mirror could be making my irritating rash look a lot more unpleasant than it actually is — I like that thought, so I’ll stick with it.