The Monster in the Mirror

The mirror is a monster for a lot of people.

I know this because I have stood in front of it and felt the room change.

Not every time. Not dramatically. No gothic apparition rising out of the glass. Sometimes it’s much quieter than that. You’re brushing your teeth, washing your face, catching yourself in a shop window. Someone shows you a photograph they’ve just taken. And suddenly you aren’t simply seeing yourself.

You are being assessed.

One moment there’s a man standing there. The next moment there’s evidence. Evidence of age, of tiredness, of decisions made and not made. Evidence of the body changing. Evidence of time doing what time does, which is to move through us whether we’ve granted permission or not.

The mirror doesn’t lie, exactly. That would be too easy. If it lied, I could dismiss it: bad glass, bad angle, bad lighting, bad morning. But the mirror is more dangerous because it tells a partial truth with absolute confidence.

It shows the surface and then lets the mind do the damage.

And my mind, like most minds, has been well trained. It knows how to turn a face into a problem. It knows how to compare the present body with some imagined earlier body, conveniently forgetting what it was like to live inside that earlier one. The younger man gets better-looking with every year that separates me from him. Apparently, he was also more certain, more energetic and closer to getting his life sorted out. Memory makes a generous publicist for someone who no longer has to show up.

I suspect that if I could stand beside him, we’d both find something wrong with ourselves. He’d be worrying about a future I’m now accusing myself of having wasted. Neither of us would be paying much attention to the fact that we were alive in the same room.

The people in the glass

The glass itself says nothing. Stand in front of it long enough, though, and you can hear people who haven’t been in your life for twenty years.

The comments. The jokes. The rejections. The cultural instructions that arrived so early they began to sound like your own thoughts. A man should be strong, composed, capable, unbothered. He should take care of himself without appearing to care too much about his appearance. He should age well, which often seems to mean showing the authority of age while concealing as much of its physical evidence as possible.

There’s a particular strain in being asked to look invulnerable while living in a body. Bodies get tired. They soften, ache, need sleep. They have days when the face gives away something the mouth was planning to keep quiet.

And a Black man’s face and body are never entirely private. The world is always reading something into them before he has even opened his mouth. Strength, threat, confidence, attitude: meanings can arrive ahead of the person. I don’t get to control all those readings. But knowing they’re there can change the way I look at myself. I can begin checking the face for what someone else might decide it means.

That makes the bathroom a crowded place. I can be alone and still not get to look at myself alone.

So the mirror is not just glass. It is a courtroom. And sometimes I stand there as both accused and prosecutor.

Too old. Too soft. Too tired. Too this. Not enough that. Not quite the man I imagined I’d be when I was younger and still believed the future would arrive clean and obedient. Not quite the warrior, the professor, the writer. Not quite the self-made man who owed nobody anything.

Owe nobody anything

I was raised with a strong current of self-reliance running through me. Owe nobody anything. Stand on your own feet. Be capable. Be independent.

There’s strength in that inheritance. It has carried me. I don’t want to dismiss the discipline that helped me move from Newark beginnings into Army dreams and through the reinventions that followed. Being able to act, to take responsibility, to keep going when things become difficult: those are real gifts. I still want them.

But self-reliance has also sharpened the mirror. When you believe you’re responsible for making yourself, every perceived flaw can start to feel like a personal failure. You don’t merely have a body that’s changing. You have a body you apparently failed to manage properly.

The body becomes a report card. The face becomes a progress review. Ageing becomes an accusation: what have you done with the time?

And now, edging deeper into this late-middle passage of life, I feel that question more. Not always as dread. Sometimes as fuel. Sometimes as tenderness towards the years I couldn’t understand while I was living them. But it’s there, waiting for a glimpse of grey in the beard or an expression I don’t remember having before.

There are things I wish I’d done differently. I don’t need a philosophy that makes every decision wise after the event. Some opportunities were missed. Some habits stayed longer than they should have. The trouble begins when regret stops referring to something particular and spreads across the whole person. I wish I’d done that differently becomes look at you. A whole life gets hauled in to answer for one tired face on one ordinary morning.

The self-made man is particularly vulnerable to this trick because he’s given himself a job nobody can finish. He must be the maker and the material, the foreman and the finished product. Even rest can feel like neglect of the works.

And what happens when he needs someone? When he can’t fix it? When love arrives in a form that requires him to be helped rather than admired?

Owing nobody anything sounds like freedom until it makes receiving care feel like a debt. I wonder how much of what I call independence has, at times, been an attempt to avoid being seen in need. The mirror catches that man too: the one who wants to be held, but would prefer to look as though he could carry everything himself.

Carrying the inspection around

We didn’t leave the mirror in the bathroom. We put a camera on the front of the phone and carried the inspection around.

Now a conversation can come with a small image of ourselves in the corner. Someone is speaking and there’s another, quieter activity taking place: checking the face, the posture, the angle. Do I look interested? Do I look tired? Is that really how I look when I’m listening?

It’s an odd arrangement. We can watch ourselves having an experience instead of quite having it. A photograph of a good afternoon becomes an opportunity to dislike the person who was enjoying it. The record of being there starts competing with the pleasure of having been there.

I don’t want to blame the camera for inventing vanity or shame. The courtroom was open long before the smartphone. But it has become easier to keep the hearing in session. There’s always another image to inspect, another version of the face to approve or reject.

I keep coming back to the cost in attention. While I’m deciding whether I look like someone worth listening to, what am I failing to hear? While I’m checking whether I look alive enough in the photograph, where has the actual afternoon gone?

There must be a point at which seeing myself more often means being present less often. I don’t know exactly where that point is. I know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life watching myself spend it.

The page asks better questions

What have you done with the time?

The mirror asks it badly. Writing asks it better.

That may be why I trust the page more than the glass. The page lets me become slowly. It doesn’t demand that I appear all at once. It lets me contradict myself, revise myself, wander off, return, discover that what looked like failure was actually material.

A life is a palimpsest, a manuscript written over without everything underneath disappearing. The boy in Newark doesn’t vanish because the soldier arrives. The soldier doesn’t disappear when the writer begins to name what he wants. Earlier selves remain in the vocabulary, the reflexes, the things I notice and the things I still struggle to say.

On the page, I can spend time with them. I can discover that the self I’m judging had reasons I haven’t been willing to remember. He knew less than I know now. He was trying to solve a different problem. Sometimes he was simply afraid. Understanding that doesn’t make every choice right, but it makes a person visible where I’d been keeping a list of errors.

The mirror freezes me. The page releases me.

Except I know the page can become a courtroom too. I can turn a journal into another instrument of inspection. Count the unwritten words, catalogue the shortcomings, demand that every difficult experience redeem itself by becoming a useful paragraph. Even the claim that everything is material can grow teeth. Must I make something from every hurt before I’m allowed to have lived through it?

Writing helps when it gives experience time and room. When I can put down something unresolved without immediately making it support a better story about me. Some days the honest sentence is simply that I’m tired. The next sentence doesn’t have to turn tiredness into wisdom.

I want that freedom in front of the glass as well.

The man who has carried me

I can’t simply reject the mirror. Something in me still wants reconciliation with the visible self, with the face and body, with the man in the glass who has carried me through all of it.

Because he has carried me.

Through Newark beginnings and Army dreams. Through fatherhood, work, marriage and uncertainty. Through all the different costumes of becoming. Through the years when I didn’t call myself a writer and the years when I finally did. Through the long apprenticeship of learning that freedom isn’t just escape, but the courage to inhabit your own life without flinching.

I can know all that and still dislike a photograph. An insight doesn’t necessarily survive first contact with the bathroom light. I don’t want to turn reconciliation into another standard I’m failing to meet: now I must age gracefully, love every line and demonstrate enlightened gratitude for my changing body.

Some changes are losses. Some things become harder. I can grieve that without putting the whole of myself on trial. I can want to be healthier, stronger or better rested without using contempt to get myself there. Care has plenty to do without recruiting cruelty as its supervisor.

So I’m interested in changing the question.

Instead of asking only how I look, I can ask what this face has witnessed. Instead of beginning with what’s wrong with the body, I can remember what it has carried. And instead of measuring myself against the man I once meant to become, I can ask what kind of man is still trying to emerge through me now.

That last question gives me somewhere to go. The younger man’s plans don’t have to govern every remaining year. He wanted things I still want. He also wanted things whose cost he couldn’t yet imagine. I can honour his hunger without letting him run the whole household.

The face isn’t a failed advertisement for youth. It’s the face I have now. There’s history in it, though I need to be careful here too: lines aren’t proof of wisdom, any more than tired eyes are proof of failure. The body doesn’t owe me a beautiful metaphor to justify its existence. It gets to be a body.

I still like the idea of the face as a little mirror of the deep within. Something of a person becomes visible there. But no glance can contain a whole interior life, and that includes my own glance at myself. I don’t know everything about the man looking back. There are things he hasn’t yet found words for. Things he’ll discover only by leaving the room and living the next part.

There you are

Perhaps reconciliation begins with a less ambitious encounter.

To stand there in the morning and not summon the monster. To look at the man looking back and say: there you are.

Not there you are, you disappointment. Not there you are, you unfinished improvement project. Not there you are, you should have been more by now.

Just: there you are.

The words don’t require admiration. They don’t ask me to deny what hurts or pretend the years haven’t passed. They let recognition happen before assessment. For a moment, nobody needs to earn his place in the room.

I want to see whether I can let that moment be enough. Whether I can meet the visible edge of this much deeper life without demanding a verdict, then get on with inhabiting it. There are still things I want to write. Places I want to walk. People whose faces I’d rather be looking at than monitoring my own.

The monster may have something else to say tomorrow. I don’t imagine one essay will put it out of work.

But I can rinse the toothpaste from the sink. Put the toothbrush down. Leave before the inspection is finished.

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