I am a girl who, like most girls, has spent her life around mirrors. It has always been a daily correspondence, this relationship with mirrors. “Good morning,” one will usually say to me when I first get up. “Holy smokes, would you check out those bags under your eyes! You look like crap.” Later, another mirror might say, “Your hair is looking dry these days. Better wear it up to hide those split ends.” When I’m trying to get dressed for work or for school or for fun, I hear, “Those pants make your a– look like the state of Texas. That striped shirt is not doing you any favors. Green is not your color, girl.”
These conversations with mirrors, I suspect, are common among most women. I’m afraid that most females over the age of nine probably have intimate relationships with mirrors, too. Some women may not have mirrors as mean as mine, but some women probably have mirrors that are even meaner. The catch is that my mirrors are sometimes nice, and when they are nice, they are so nice that I’m willing to forgive them for the mean things they say. I always come crawling back to my mirrors.
But something sort of cool happened when I moved into my new apartment last month. I didn’t bring my big full length mirror with me, the one that always had something mean to say about my outfits and my a–. This mirror was maybe the meanest and the nicest of all my mirrors. It really knew how to charm me into believing what it had to say. And it’s not that I intentionally left it behind when I moved — I just kind of forgot it. I remembered it about a week into my new place. I was getting dressed for school and all of a sudden I realized — oh my God. I have no idea how I look! My a– could look like Texas right now and I wouldn’t know it. I need my mirror! I panicked and almost went back to my house to get it that night after class. But I didn’t.
And I still haven’t. And the startling thing is that one month later, I don’t miss that mirror at all. It feels amazing. I wear what I feel like wearing and don’t dread what that big-mouthed mirror has to say about my a– or my clothes. It was hard at first but now it is so easy. I trust in myself and my choices and I carry myself with a kind of confidence that is new to me and refreshingly comfortable. For the first time in my life I don’t really give a damn about what mirrors have to say.
I highly recommend it. Get rid of your full length mirrors. Keep one small mirror in your bathroom just to make sure you don’t have spinach in your teeth — but get rid of the others. You’ll feel so liberated, so powerful and so wonderful.
