Living In A World Without Mirrors

Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash

What if we lived in a world where there were no mirrors? or anything to see our reflection in.

How would we have an image of how do we look?

That’s exactly how we do build our self-image in this world.

In the world with no way to see our reflection, we will create an image of ourselves based on what people tell us or the circumstances around us.

To give some examples:

• If someone was in a bad mood and they commented something negative about our looks, we will add that to self-reflection.
• If we were having a rough day and our hair got messy and someone commented ‘your hair look funny’, we will live our lives thinking something is wrong with our hair. While in reality, we can quickly fix our hair and most probably did.
• If our parents had seen only a certain type of nose and we did not have that type, we will continue thinking we are living with a deformity.
• If it was sunny outside and we were squinting and someone sitting in shade told us that our eyes are tiny, we will continue living with a feeling of being something odd.

The people who comment about what kind of person we are, are telling based on what they see at present moment.

If the comment is genuine and we need to improve, we can do that and move on with life, the same way we remove something on our nose and move on.

Without a way of truly seeing ourselves thoroughly, we continue carrying this self-image based on the opinions of people around us.

The worst part is, it is tough for us to erase and redraw the part in that image based on latest updates.

We continue living with the same brush stroke or line our teacher drew when we were ten years old, and now that we are in our mid-twenties and doing much better in life than that person and do know that she did not know enough to have a good contribution in our image, we do not go ahead change the part she added.

Given that we are living in a world with no way to see our complete reflection (not just the physical one), we should be very careful and always doubtful about the self-image we are carrying and should try to keep it updated to the best of our knowledge and keep removing the parts added by wrong people and circumstances.