On Mirrors and Photographs and Self

I have never felt comfortable in my skin. I've always felt like I was wearing an ill-fitting dress, some strange fabric that slips and bulges and billows in all the wrong places, something I have to tug and adjust every time I move. Something separate from the core of me. I don't like photographs, unless they are carefully staged and my expression is just right. I think I've perfected the expression that works, and you'll recognize it in my self-portraits: eyes looking up (this feels angelic and lovely), head tilted slightly upward (to avoid those horrid extra chins), hair finger-tousled and wind-swept (this seems romantic and dangerous), and shoulders back (thus defining the collarbone, waifish). This feels safe, gives me the illusion of control.

But of course there are the times when I lose this control, and I catch a brief glimpse of myself in an unfamiliar mirror, a car window, the reflection in a shop door. These moments are by definition fleeting, and while they leave me shaken and unsteady, I can stumble onwards. The brief vertigo of being confronted by a reality one has, through years of conditioning, refused to acknowledge is sickening, but it goes away. Those years of conditioning have served me well. But an actual photograph – that destroys me.

Talk about sickening. I look like a monster in candid photographs. Sickening. I wonder how people can even stand to look at me. How do they not turn to stone, how do I not petrify every unfortunate creature who is unlucky enough to meet my stare? I wonder about other people. Do they feel this too, do they see a monster in the mirror?

I wish I could unzip my skin, and strip myself down to flesh and sinew and bone. I wish I could rebuild myself from there, slowly adding shape and curve and colour, adding layers of skin and connective tissue, shaping cheekbones and nose and chin perfectly, until I am a pretty, living doll, the creature I want to be. The girl everyone wants, the girl everyone wants to be, the girl I suspect I might be, the girl who isn't afraid to look in the mirror or smile for the camera.

The girl who doesn't sicken me, who doesn't sicken you.