When you look in the mirror.

I have thought for a while about writing this post, but for some reason I didn't. Then, I got a surprisingly good response to my 'Easter Monday' post which I really enjoyed writing, and decided to go ahead.

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and criticised? Everyone does it. It's what happens afterwards that counts. If your self-criticism develops - say, for example, you look at your hair and then you move onto your nose, or ears, or whatever - then you may be interested in reading on. If, however, you are of that rare breed of person who is efficiently practical in how they go about it - 'Ah, my nose is a little out of joint,' then you might not wish to. Yet - hang on, I can't actually think of anyone who thinks about themselves in the latter way, apart from when we look at something which we have the immediate power to change. Say, for example, I may look at my eyebrows and think 'Ooh, they could do with being neater,' but that's rather different from when I look at my breasts and think 'Why must you be so disproportionately big?!'

So many of us look in the mirror - or at our bodies - and we have that little snowball moment when the self-criticism just keeps growing and growing, and quite probably births a shadowy, snapping Pac-man of insecurity that closes its jaws over us. Suddenly, our mood is ruined and the happiness of the day is never quite completely recovered.

In my class Crises of Consciousness: American Writing, 1880-1915, we've been reading scraps of psychological/medical texts alongside the usual literature. Unsurprisingly, it's made for a very interesting reading experience. The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley wrote a bit about 'the self' which we looked at, developing on the ideas of that pioneer of early American psychology, William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. Don't run away now, I shan't load you down with biography any further!

William James is revolutionary (to me at least) in that he proposes that we all have at least two selves: our 'inner' (or 'real', if you will) self and our 'social' self. However, it gets more confusing than that. Apparently, a man effectively has as many social selves as there are people who know him.

Stop and think about this, and it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Of course all your friends and family and whoever else will all have a particular image of you in their head. The image may vary little across certain groups or pairs of people, but vary it will because people are individuals. Cooley's twist on this is that not only do we have a minimum of two selves, but that our 'inner' self is in itself actually two people. 'The impulse to communicate is not so much a result of thought as it is an inseparable part of it,' he says in Human Nature and the Social Order, chapter Sociability and Personal Ideas.

So... we do not communicate because we have thought; rather, we think, therefore we communicate. He describes the tendency of children to have an imaginary friend and how this is carried over into adulthood in our tendency to have conversations with ourselves, and also in our tendency (though not everyone necessarily does this literally), to treat our daily process of living as a sort of ongoing narrative. Essentially, what he is saying is that our thought manifests itself as a sort of inner dialogue.

Again, stop and consider this. We as human beings have an ongoing 'stream of consciousness' where our brains are processing information and reacting to stimuli non-stop. Alongside this is a steady conversion of rudimentary impulses into mental expression: thought. This often means that thought is being converted into language and vice-versa (especially if you're in contact with other people). for example, you may hear your thoughts as your own voice, or see them as words... or both... or even images... or all three... We are not simple creatures at all, are we?

So, whether you like it or not, you are effectively two people. You are 'other' to yourself at all times. People often view this negatively - and no surprise, because it's rather a scary thought. It also sounds slightly fantastical. Yet, there it is: you are two people. One of you is noting everything down - the observer - and the other is reacting to what the first notes down, if you want to think of it that way. While you do this, you (I mean both of you :-D) are in the presence of other people, and you may be looking for the disparity in them too, but without realising; say, in the way that you look at both a person's body language as well as their verbal communication when you 'socialise.'

So, look at yourself in the mirror again, and this time, STOP the critical impulse. Pretend you are a baby or a child. Do babies look at themselves in the mirror and criticise their teeth? No - because they're not developed enough to convert and shape thought. Thought is purely reactive for them because the critical parts of their brain aren't finished growing. Hence they look around and see things in a truly 'naked' sense.

I did this with myself. I stared at myself, and then I tried a little experiment. I looked at the face in the mirror and thought Hello. I switched on the light and refused to be cowed. Hello, I thought, you are me, and I am you. That means nothing, because I don't see you all the time, do I? You're not projected out beside me, like a full-colour, 3D hologram-shadow, when I walk to lessons, are you?

I thought about this. It was true. I didn't even have a full-length mirror, so every day, I looked at the neck-up part only. Every day, as I set off for lessons, my judgement of how 'good' or bad' I looked was based on my neck, face and perhaps a few snatched glimpses of me gained by jumping up and down in front of the mirror. So where did this picture of me in my head come from? It came from previous reflections caught in the mirror. From pictures. From the words of others.

I looked at myself again, coming back out of that temporary smokescreen of thought to the face in the mirror. So, I thought, there I am. Or should I say, there 'you' are. Naturally, there was no response, but I could sense agreement in the impassivity of the face. If you think about it - and of course you are, because you are me - I didn't exactly make you, did I? Mute agreement. You were sort of formed, and conferred on me like a judgement. Yes. I don't think you look like me. No. But that's because I already have an image of me that's internal, that lives in the words of my thoughts. It's built on things like 'sarcastic,' 'foodie,' and 'loving'... Well, quite.

So, if you - I mean me - I mean we - think about it, the 'real' or 'usual' or 'inner' me doesn't even have a face. No. Strange, isn't it? Very. Well, if I own you, but didn't make you, I shouldn't have to take full responsibility for what other people think of you. Damn straight. That means I don't have to own criticism of you. You're effectively an autonomous being. I came into the world, and so did you, but there's not much I can do to control how you're seen. No. Because, you see, that goes back to things like genetics and biology... and then on a level I suppose it does affect me, because if I am nice to people, they will find a way to like you. They might call you 'serene' or 'beautiful', as they did with Princess Diana.

Yeeees? ... But that's just ironic isn't it? Of course things like 'beautiful' exist in the head, in abstract form. Then, you shoot them out through your eyes and your mouth onto other things. Now you're getting it. I am. I see how it works now. We all apply our feelings to each other, all the time. Our sight is almost never 'naked'. I'm looking at you now, and I have made myself SHUT UP. I have made myself SEMI-BLIND. I see features. You are a pair of shoulders and eyes, a nose, a mouth, a face. A hairline. I made you carry a lot of weight for a long time. Sorry about that. Do you want to be friends? Why, sure. There's a condition, though. Which is...? In future, you're going to criticise me, because you're human, and particularly because you're female. I want you to remember this conversation. Remember it fully. We're not the same. We belong to the same 'person,' but I'm almost like another person. You see me in the mirror, like somebody else - the only difference that you take liberties in criticising me, that you wouldn't usually dare to take with somebody else. Again, I'm very sorry about that. Good. Now, run along and don't forget what I said. If ever it gets bad, keep looking at me, until the tears are in your eyes. The tears will blur your vision - but, I bet before you even reach that stage - you'll stop looking at me even as you continue to criticise. You'll retreat within a cloud of your own masochism. I mention the tears just to illustrate the lengths you unknowingly go in deforming me. It's not fair, and it's not right.

No.

With that final admission, I realised I had gone 'out of myself' - just as my impassive face had warned - and into the world of thought-filtered vision. I looked at the face again. I remembered the hypocrisy it had justly charged me with. I vowed to be honest with myself, as I always sought honesty elsewhere. There were spots. Eye-bags. The nose could have been perfectly straight, and anger burst through me. Was I a mannequin? - no! The faults lingered - and slowly, circling them as though it were a Heat magazine spread - I pushed them back. I called forth my whole face. Yes, the spots and so forth were a source of dismay. Yet the eyes were undoubtedly interesting. The mouth had a sensuous fullness to it. Like a jigsaw puzzle, I placed the eyes above the eye-bags, the mouth below the nose. The spots fell into place against a backdrop of otherwise obedient and even-toned skin. The extremes of my like and dislike cancelled themselves cleverly out. It had been difficult and a sense of fear lurked unexpectedly in me. Yet, I had done it. I had called my face up to me, whole.

I would be very interested to see if any of my readers try this with themselves, and see what happens. You don't have to do as I did - just stare in the mirror and have a brutally honest conversation with yourself. Put those masochistic tendencies to novel use, and I for one would be intrigued to see how it makes you feel.