During a hospital visit today I had a moment to look at someone other than myself in a mirror. An odd experience it was, because I had never seen this particular person’s reflected image; I had always seen her the way everyone sees her.
Her mirrored image was very different from the one to which I had become accustomed. Of course everything was reversed, but it was more than that. She didn’t look anything like the person I have known for nearly all my years in the Quad Cities.
Later it occurred to me that for that brief instant I was seeing this person the way she sees herself every time she looks in a mirror; I was seeing her through her eyes, not my own. And the view was quite different. Not different bad, or different good...just different.
The experience prompted me to wonder how differently people see me than I see myself. Is everything for the people who view my life reversed, or at least significantly different from my perspective? Does the person I think I am vary that much from the person others’ experiences?
I ask these questions not to extrude your evaluations of my situation, but rather to request your reflections on your own. What’s your sense of how closely your self-awareness parallels others’ perceptions? Do others receive you the same way you receive yourself? I understand if you don’t care what others think — most of the time I don’t either — but for a moment humor my curiosity.
I don’t think this is a question of whose perception is accurate. Nor am I suggesting that you and I undergo some kind of therapeutic intervention for our distorted views. It’s just that we live basically bottled up in our minds, spirits, and bodies. We have first hand experience of ourselves and the world only through personal senses. Our onlookers – those who receive, review, and evaluate us – similarly have only their own lenses through which to view us. We might be surprised (and aided) if we lived more aware of and open to our respective perspectives and limitations.
That word limitations is important. The person I saw in the mirror today also saw me...in the mirror. For once she saw me the way I see myself. At last word, she has survived the encounter.
Pray with me:
Help me see myself the way you see me. Let me be sensitive to others’ views, but not enslaved to them. Help me grow from the truth you offer to me from others. Shape me into a beacon of light, hope, and honesty to others. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
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looking at ourselves in the mirror is one of the hardest things for anyone, and as someone in recovery, it is especially difficult. but it is essential. i find that before i can be honest with anyone, including Jesus, i must be honest with myself. and i have to be able to look at myself in the mirror and be happy with it. i actually can see myself not as others see me, but as only as i can see myself ... with an honest appraisal of both my outward appearence and with what is in my heart and soul. that is where the real test is. i shine a mirror on my life each and every day and i ask God to accept me and to help me be a better person. sometimes i like what i see in the mirror. sometimes i don't. and sometimes i'm sorry for what others see when they look at me, because it is not the image that God wants me to project to the world. I am supposed to be Jesus for others ... and in failing that, I fail God and myself. Still, I try. and i do believe that an honest effort to live the life that God wants me to live is enough ... but it must be honest, an honesty that I can see when I look into the eyes of the person staring back to me from the mirror. "To thine own self be true."
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