My mirror tells me I am too fat.
My mirror tells me I will need a face-lift because the wrinkles are beginning to show;
My mirror tells me my skin colour is not favoured.
My mirror tells me the dress does not fit right.
My mirror! Oh my mirror! A million and one reasons to tear you off my wall, and
smash you into a million pieces!
Indeed! A million and one reasons to throw that lifeless piece of furniture out of the window and out of your life.
If the mirror could speak, maybe its words would have sounded thus:
“I stand as a lifeless object; I rely on you to give me life, I do not have the power to create, so what I do is this. I simply look at you through the eyes of your mind. There I see an image you have made of yourself and I reflect it back to you. What I am saying in essence is this; whatever you say it is I am telling you, is actually what you have told yourself at one point or the other of your life. I see what you see of yourself and tell you what you are telling yourself.”
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary defines a mirror as “a piece of special flat glass that reflects images, so that you can see yourself when you look at it.” The glass reflects, it is actually then left for me to do the perception and the seeing. My interpretation of what the mirror shows is actually that of an image I have formed in my mind.
Ken Keys Jnr was he who said, “To be upset over what you don’t have, is to waste what you do have.” Many a times, I become a slave to the desire of things I cannot have and continually long to be what I am not. I allow others to dictate what I ought to look like, what I ought to wear, even how I ought to talk. This usually marks first step in the formation of wrong images in my mind. Images I tag with unpleasant words such as ugly, fat, ill- shaped, thin, old, you name it! These are words formed when I compare myself to an “ideal.”
However, I have come to realise that the first step in the appreciation of who I am is to see myself as the “ideal”. Allow me to suggest that it is the image you project of yourself that others, including the mirror, will perceive. A re-conditioning of the mind becomes necessary if one must get good “reviews” from the looking glass. See yourself as beautiful, the best. You have every reason to. Even the bible declares it in Psalms 139 vs 14 that “I am fearfully and wonderfully made...” This way it becomes easier to love yourself, and who you are!
The moment we start to see ourselves through the eyes of love, unique and beautiful, and start to confess same, the mirror will have no option than to see us that way. Since I learnt this, thanks to motivational books and talks, I no longer have to avoid standing in front of my mirror. You too can enjoy standing at your mirror and hearing those beautiful words, “you are the finest of them all”. The choice is yours, really!
Note: The writer does not claim to be an authority in the field of psychology, or related fields.
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