THE MIRROR

 

I felt something as I walked away that evening. It was a painful reminder that I’d been here before, but this time I wasn’t the one who left feeling like the victim. No, it was me feeling like I had done the hurting, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s all the ways I had made another feel.

You see, this mirror thing is way more than the beauty gazes and secret dances we do staring back at ourselves. The mirror is indeed a peek into our inner selves, a reflection of some things we can’t stare too long at. Still, yet we’d turn left and poke another right at the spot where it could hurt, but the bigger question is, do we even know that it’ll hurt?, do we know that our actions and Inactions mirrored back at us could be the very reason the last person walked out of our lives?.

What do you see in the mirror? I’ll go first as always, but I’ll tell a shorter story. Once in my grown-ish age, I couldn’t understand why another human would need space away from their other half; it didn’t make sense to me. Why would they need time away? Is there a need to have more than one friend asides from me? Haven’t you thought how negative it would be to fall asleep while talking to me? Don’t you see emotional decisions aren’t all bad?  Why aren’t I the only reason you exist? It’s honestly funny now. Why wouldn’t you say everything without blinking? How does anxiety even affect the ways you react? Imagine that! Yes, it was me, needing, reaching, wanting, and stretching ways I needed to make a mark on another human. The desire to carve them, engrave my existence deep in their soul to possess every way they would ever think or act. In those times, it was perfectly okay. I wasn’t looking in the mirror too long.

Now fast forward, I’m holding a glass in one hand, with coffee I wouldn’t drink. I’m the one explaining that I want this space; I’m the one arguing how I want to stretch the almost same way I crucified another for desiring in their heart. So it dawned on me, as painful as it was to accept, I did realize that I couldn’t stand to take in my reflection too long in the mirror. It was more evident that the crazy ideas of my perception on how people must act were drenched in plenty of dysfunctional knowledge.

The mirror told the truth; even I couldn’t stand ‘I.’

I looked longer that day, searched all the corner reflections for the things I should see clearer. I was wrong. It wasn’t all that pretty, and I needed to unlearn and learn the truth.  In essence, there’s every need to understand that we’re all uniquely different. There’s no way to tell who’s real or not in this age, but we walk gently and trust slowly. We cannot judge another based on how we think ourselves to be wired. It’s rather unfair. Most of us don’t fully know what’s genuinely waiting to reveal itself if we stared longer at the mirror.

Life’s like that mostly; when mirrored, we indeed cannot bear our expectations of others.

“Do to others what you’d like to be done to you,” that’s the famous line, but do you fully understand what you could be doing to others? Do you even imagine how it must feel if you swallowed your pill? Do you know who you are?”

Your turn, take a longer look today; what do you see in the mirror? What needs to change?