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by Laura Samuelsson

Only in a mirror do we find ourselves. We cannot do it when we are apart, distanced, from who and what we are: we need to see our shapes, our selves, in the way we cannot see ourselves subjectively. But still, the glass plays with us, contorting and distorting, even if it is nothing more than a straightforward, honest reflection. It is our minds which are the true lenses.

Why do we feel this compunction throughout the ages to look at our own reflections? It is inbred into us; it begins at such a tender age, this obsession with oneself. I never really took much notice of it while I was young, partly because I myself was never overly concerned with my appearance, and partly because my generation was not so image-conscious. However, as the years have passed, I have grown into an awareness of this larger societal issue, watching as more and more pre-teen girls doll themselves up in tight jeans, baby T-shirts and glitzy make-up. Like observing the gorillas in the mist, I watch as these girls preen and pluck, check themselves over and over in their compacts and handheld mirrors, readjust their clothes and redo their hair. It is, from a clinical viewpoint, disturbing.

I doubt any of those girls remember the first time they ever saw their reflections in mirrors. If they even did, I further doubt that they would make anything of it, ponder its repercussions, question the greater impact of this first awakening. It is not an emotional, sexual, or intellectual awakening, no: it is a subtle and important transition from the world of the oblivious to the waking world of self-consciousness.

As a very young child, I looked for myself in any reflective surface I could find. I would crane my neck to find that swish of long blonde hair, that crinkled little blue eye, playing a childish game of hide-and-seek with that girl who followed me so blissfully and easily.

Sometimes I wish myself back to my days of oblivion, where I could be secure in my own self-disinterest. Try as I might, I lack the mental ruby slippers, and I wind up falling straight through the gaps in my head. They are loopholes of disgust. I hate myself. I hate my body, my ribcage, my short legs, my muscular frame; I long for Vogue beauty, a runway torso, fashion model features. I cannot reconcile what others seem to see with my own reflection, for she is grotesque and hopeless.

I never look for myself anymore because I know what I will find.

***

I can still remember the fateful moment wherein I saw who and what I was. A blonde child, her hair highlighted by the sun streaming in through the windows, two dimples on either side of her pink mouth, she was I. I knew that. Even though no one had sat me down in front of my childhood vanity and said, "See, Laura, there you are. That other girl across from you is yourself," I tacitly and subconsciously understood.

The girl did not seem to me, at that time in my life, that bad.

Now things are different: I have been affected by society and its continual emphasis on how much thought and energy I should put into my personal appearance. But at least I had that time in my life where I was carefree and contented with myself. A few years ago, I was babysitting two young girls in a small suburb in Loveland, Ohio. The younger, a petite brunette of three years, covered lightly in baby fat and brownish fuzz, approached me one evening. "Do you think I'm fat?" she asked bluntly, her doe eyes wide with apprehension.

"Of course not." It was the only thing I-baffled, flabbergasted-could say.

"My mom says I'm fat." Her mom would say that, a woman passionately preoccupied with her own impending aging, her own dismaying spiral into the inevitable.

"You are definitely not fat. You're beautiful," I told her. It, too, was the only thing I could say.

Everyone looks at herself differently, seeing something that is not there, missing that which is most obvious to everyone else. And sometimes she is so focused on what she should be looking for that everything else fades away; society has given her a checklist, and she will check. Daily. Hourly. In the bathroom mirror, in the compact, in the sparkling pane of glass of the bakery.

I always relate this perception of mine to a painting by a relatively obscure artist named Ivan Albright. Into The World There Came A Soul Called Ida is the name of this particular painting that caught my eye in the Chicago Art Institute as I wandered its halls one extremely cantankerous August day two years ago. Suddenly, I saw Ida: old, doughy, worn by age, she was stretched into stained and frayed lingerie. Although she was only in her mid-twenties when she posed for Albright-a young model, a new mother-she is painted as she would appear forty years later. Her face is made up thickly, garishly, and she is frowning into a handheld mirror. To my eyes, everything appeared black, the floor, the wicker chair, the dressing table, the shadows-I could only focus on Ida and her worried eyes. Despite the image she sees in her mirror, a figure that is beyond cosmetic repair, her vanity is still pawing at her.

I wish I could help her, reach into the painting and turn her away from that mirror, away from the pots of makeup strewn on the dressing table top; but I have nothing to turn her towards. It is the same everywhere, this pervasive miasma of vanity, fear, regret. Albright saw something in Ida as she sat in that chair upon which he could extrapolate, and so he did. I, too, could see it: Ida's vanity captured and stilled, magnified horrifically for all the world to see. On the dressing table next to her are her used pots of makeup, an off-white lace doily and a vase containing a wilted rosebud.
Ida is that rosebud.

***

Regret is an opiate: it drugs our senses, overwhelms our rationalities and drives us to our knees. Honestly, I believe that some people worship regret the way others worship vanity. It nourishes them constantly, for it is a wellspring that will never run dry; self-perpetuating and untiring, it will continue long after we believe ourselves to have ceased caring. We never truly do.

It is odd how regret and vanity-this crippling cycle-is genetically transferred. I know there is no biological basis for this behavior, that there is no psychological proof of this statement, but I see the testimony in my own family.

My grandmother is seventy-one years old. A reverse Ida, she spent the first forty years of her conscientious self-awareness despising her body, thinking herself overweight and unattractive. Unlike Ida, whose vanity stemmed from her knowledge of her beauty, my grandmother's vanity stemmed from something wholly different: her supposed knowledge of her ugliness. It consumed her.

Photographs show my grandmother ducking out of the corners; home video always discloses her scampering off into a far corner, away from that searching celluloid. But there are glimpses of her, slim, smiling, red-lipsticked, beautiful. A few months ago, while my grandmother and I were talking over glasses of champagne, she suddenly blurted out, "I feel so foolish!"

I asked her why. "Because I spent years, years, thinking I was just. . ." she motioned grandly with her arms, circling her waist, "fat, and there I was, all that time, slim and trim as can be." I nodded. "It's amazing. All that time wasted." A sly look entered her eyes, and she grinned at me. "I was a babe, actually. And I never even knew it."
My grandmother's right on both accounts. She definitely was a babe. And she never knew it until it was all irrevocably, inevitably gone.

***

So few of us can truly come to terms with ourselves and our appearances. What holds us back, me back? I can still see that reflected image of myself, clear and sparkling, happy to be me. Could I still truthfully say that? No. My imperfections are too glaring for me to overlook them, and so I don't.

Obviously, I am not the only person who has ever lamented this tragic aspect of American society. So many people-men, children, and especially women-constantly battle against themselves, slipping further and further into a pool of regret over what are only façades. Alice Walker wrote about this particular personal crisis in her essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self." Walker, as both a child and an adolescent, could not come to terms with her right eye, which was blinded by a stray bullet fired by one of her brothers when she was young. She saw only the hideous, disfigured part of herself, an eye that was cloudy and murky, swollen and useless.

As I read the essay, I understood that Walker could not discover herself by herself. Blinded-metaphorically this time-by her own blindness, she could not bring herself to look past the immediate physicality of her defect. She was poised in fear for the moment when her young daughter would realize her mother's imperfection and recoil in horror. Surprisingly, however, her daughter, when she came to a conscious awareness of her mother's cloudy eye, did not see deformity. She saw a world, an entire planet, soft and blue, covered in a gauzy cloud, and she told her mother so. Walker ran to her own mirror, her own physical affirmation, wherein she, too, saw herself through her daughter's eyes. Her self was "beautiful, whole, and free," dancing with Walker for the first time as an equal, wonderful part of her, alongside her in all of her imperfections and splendor. "And she is also me" (617).

***

I have made it through eighteen years of my life as myself, despite my many and fervent pleas to wake up as someone else. So I have donned masks, flirted with anorexia, cried lakes of frustration, worked hard to abolish the face that haunts my every waking moment. So far I have not seen a single noticeable change.

My roommates constantly voice their bewilderment at these frequent self-deprecations of mine. It is probably tiring for them to have to reassure me, time and again, but I have fed for too long on my own seeds of hatred and regret; now, like Persephone, I am drawn into that underworld, lost within its dark corners. I am me, I do realize that. But when I look at my other self, that frowning, miserable girl in the mirror, I cannot yet see what Walker saw in herself. However, I no longer look for myself in the mirror, not truly. Yes, it is a starting place, like the very last step to the top of the high dive. But I still have those five very long feet to walk before I can dive off into that most vast of mirrors, and I want to be able to enjoy that shimmering and sparkling last look at myself before I plunge, deeply and honestly, into my self.

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