After a shower, before I get dressed, I find myself looking in the mirror.
There's something meditative about staring at the vague outline that is me, blurred beyond recognition by the condensation of the steam which so recently clung to my body. The water hugs the mirror so close that you cannot see the individual drops, and the light glistening off of a thousand tiny beads somehow forms a mist, obscuring my vision of myself.
The mirror, I think, makes for a good metaphor.
In the mirror, I see myself. Skin, bones, flesh... This is me. This is who I am. In the mirror, I gaze upon the physical summary of everything that I am, and yet I do not recognize myself. When confronted with myself, with something so obviously me, I do not feel any connection to it, no more than when viewing a corpse. While I am in general more attractive than any decaying vessel of stranded consciousness, the point remains that by only seeing myself on these refllective moments in my small bathroom, I am hardly familiar with myself. Indeed, the scenery of the bathroom itself is more known to me, the small toilet wedged in between sink and shower, the ever changing collection of literature adorning its crown. I glimpse these things far more often, and thus am ever more familiar with the contours of a porcelain latrine than those of my own body.
The mirror is reflection squared, to my mind. Many things may be thought in front of a mirror. In those moments after a shower, I have a glimpse of myself the way the world sees me, albeit far more bedraggled and damp. Should I choose to inspect myself for a longer duration, the mist trapped within shall slowly clear, and gradually I shall be able to see myself more clearly, more as I am. And yet, no reflection may ever properly show that which is me, my mind and my heart and my soul (for I do definitely believe in soul). A reflection does not feel, does not do, it merely emulates me. But I cannot be emulated in perfection. The light being so perfectly redirected from my skin to the mirror and back into my eyes does not show me myself. Indeed, the only way for someone to truly know me would be to know my thoughts and feelings better than I know them myself, and in doing so lose their own identity, their own being.
I am the only person who may ever know me, and as such, I must take full responsibility for knowing myself. The endless complaints of the masses that they are not understood are meaningless, for by spending their time in protestation they waste their chances to become their own mirror. They are doomed, I fear, not only to the suffering that all consciousness must endure of not being understood by others, but never truly understanding themselves.
This is why I reflect, the mirror and I locked in a silent battle of inspection, for I am surely reflecting just as much it as it does me. In the mirror, with the full view of me, I am more clearly able to understand why I am not that what I see, and better able to know myself.
I shall never recognize myself, my face shall never be locked in my own memory, but I do not begrieve this fact; a face is not the self I wish to know.
For only in contrast to that which I am not do I truly become what I am.
