My dog Leah can see a squirrel at night and people approaching a mile down the road, but she can’t see herself in the mirror. I hold her up to it, and she acts as if the mirror is repellent. She’ll look anywhere else.
This is how I feel about Zoom. I’ve never wanted to teach online and now I have to. It’s like being forced to look into a mirror for hours at a time. It’s demoralizing for the non-photogenic and I’m wondering how old you must be to not care how you look in mirrors and photos. (I mean, other than clean.)
Whatever the age, I’m not there yet, and apparently, I have the same aversion my dog has seeing my own image.
It probably started when I was working at the Chesapeake Boatman Magazine, and the editor, Mike, saw a photo of me tossed on my desk. He was visibly startled. “Whoa!” I remember him saying as he looked from me to the photo. “Never let anyone take a picture of you.”
And just like that, I had learned something about myself I hadn’t known. Thanks, Mike.
Later, I was made aware of the difference between being beautiful (as is my friend, Dar) and in being “no slouch,” as I once heard my boss refer to me. He and an advertiser had been commenting to each other on the loveliness of our receptionist, Mary. “Oh, and that’s our associate editor, Laura,” I heard him say as I walked by. “She’s no slouch.” Which I interpreted as “That’s our associate editor, Laura. She is good at standing up.”
For the record, I still excel at this.
Committed to promoting the non-superficial, my parents put no emphasis on how my sisters and I looked at all, except they did make a big deal about the fact we looked like each other. As if we were, perhaps, more appealing as a set. Virtually every photograph of us in our youth is a stair-stepped group shot.
What’s interesting is that you share the exact same number of genes with your children as you do with your siblings—1/2. So, your chances of having children who resemble you are about the same as having siblings who resemble you. In my case, siblings are batting 100 and children zero.
But no matter how you feel about being photographed, there is something profound about having another person in the world who resembles you. I had a writing client who was adopted, and in writing the story of giving birth to her first child on a stormy Caribbean night, she observed that with the arrival of her baby, she was meeting her first blood relative. The first person in her world who might look like her. I was undone by that.
As my mother aged, she loved looking at herself in photos and continued experimenting with her appearance. One day, I went to her assisted living facility to pick her up, and she came cruising down the corridor behind her walker, looking like Maverick. “Whoa. Mom. Where’d you get the aviators?” I asked.
“What? Oh, these?” she responded airily, touching her shades, “I found them. “How do I look?”
Like a thief wearing Top Gun’s sunglasses?
And one Saturday, I knocked on her door and Groucho Marx opened it. My mother had taken note of a younger woman with lovely brows in the facility’s dining hall one evening and inspired, had gotten her hands on a marker of some kind and drawn two thick black lines above her real eyebrows. It was startling. We stared at each other, me shocked and trying to mask it, and her waiting for a reaction to her new look. I went into her apartment and pretended she appeared normal while strategizing ways to wrest the marker from Maverick.
There is a whole behavioral science called Mirror Talk. You repeat affirmations while gazing at your own reflection. This supposedly raises self-acceptance and self-love. Apparently, we are hardwired to feel love and compassion from faces and eye contact. Even our own.
So, I wonder if I stand here gazing in the bedroom mirror and say, “You are photogenic!” I will believe it. And in so doing, become it? What if I say, “You are doing the best you can? You are living out your soul’s plan?” A researcher did note that there is a difference between an affirmation, and a prediction. “You are so smart” is okay; “It’s all going to be fine” is not.
I actually don’t agree with this. I think predictions are their own form of spiritual alchemy. Light is both a wave and a particle until observed. Let’s collapse the wave with attention; give intention form.
I will be your mirror, and you will be mine. That’s what stories are, right? Reflections of each other?
Look into my eyes.
Angels attend you. You have much to do, and you have time.
You are racing towards joy.
Love leaves no one behind.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
Martha Finney says
This is a beautiful essay! So many wonderful, sweet things about it! And I feel compelled to contribute my own observations about appearance.
1. I hate zoom. I once had a potential client (a PhD and executive coach specializing in positive psychology) volunteer, without permission or invitation, the reason why she chose not to engage me after a two-hour zoom meeting. “Your appearance was shocking.” Well that’s helpful feedback. To me “shocking” brought to mind Otis the town drunk on the Andy Griffith show.
After I gave her my own unsolicited feedback on her feedback, she said my zoom appearance didn’t match my Linked In profile pic. Oh that. Studio lighting. Precovid lockdown. A six year old picture.
2. That guy who so kindly advised you not to let anyone take your picture. I’d like to refine that suggestion a tad: make sure that whoever takes your picture loves you. Then the world will see you through the lens of love.
Check out that classic Dorothy Maguire Ray Milland movie The Enchanted Cottage.
I love your writing! I’m so glad I stumbled upon this piece this peaceful Sunday morning.
Laura J Oliver says
I’m glad you stumbled on this column too! Come back next Sunday. It’s a weekly connection. And thank you for sharing that story! Feedback on her feedback! I love it. And it took a two- hour zoom to come to that conclusion? Ouch. Ah the internet. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Thanks for writing!
Lyn Banghart says
Having had a Zoom class with you, I can honestly say that I truly enjoyed looking at your face, watching and listening to you. It never even occurred to me to be aware of “how” you looked. When you speak, you become beautiful!
As for myself, at age 76, after I leave the house, I never even think about how I look. I never even look in a mirror in a public restroom. This is because my mother always said to me, “always look as nice as you want to before you leave the house, and then just forget about it.” I think very wise words…and I am grateful to her. Give it a try! (For Zoom, too!)
Laura Oliver says
What a mom! Good advice! Thanks for writing (and reading), Lyn.
Nancy Prendergast says
Laura, your essay makes me think of the four years I spent as a teen in a convent boarding school. I wasn’t a novitiate, none of us wanted to become a nun. But we shared a floor of the convent with the good sisters. One of the most lasting things I learned in those formative years was to never look in a mirror. I learned to brush my teeth looking out the window and spending the most minimal amount of time checking that the part in my hair was straight. It became such an ingrained habit that even today, I have to remind myself to look in the mirror before I go out the door in the morning.
Thanks for bringing back the memories!
Laura J Oliver says
And you look beautiful anyway! Thanks for writing, Nancy!
Joe Feldman says
Hi Laura,
First of all…. “you ain’t chopped liver”.
Second…. Guys like Mike, who feel intimidated by a woman, due to their own insecurities, often will minimize or ignore a woman’s appearance or attributes with sarcasm or criticism.
Guys do this to try and put the woman on the defensive, feel insecure and vulnerable.
All to try and level the playing field, hide their insecurities and feel they have an upper hand.
When dating someone new, I would take notice of how often my date would take every opportunity to check herself out.
Whether it was her reflection in a store window or any mirror within visual distance.
I often used this as a litmus test, an indicator as to her vanity, self-absorbed personality, degree of insecurity or an oversized self impressed ego.
I wasn’t being superficial, petty or overly critical, but it always seemed to be indicative of the persons ability to focus on someone other than themselves.
But, that was me and that was an important quality.
It’s about how much you wish or need to appear and appeal to others on the outside…as it is about…. how you look at yourself and how you feel about yourself on the inside….that can contribute greatly to excess mirror time.
(part-2: is looking in a mirror a metaphor for seeing ourselves for who we are or who we wish to be?)
Writing a weekly column, mini-memoir or sharing a personal experience, requires courage.
The courage to share one’s inner-most feelings, to fully expose oneself and step out from behind any curtain.
How else could someone have the ability to dig so deeply and honestly, from within and extract the emotions, that serve to construct a story, every week.
To hide or withhold, not only eliminates potential story ideas, but also fails to release and liberate emotions, that get in our way.
For me, it’s a lesson learned.
How could I possibly write a non-fiction memoir of the impactful chapters of my life and evolution, without the courage to release it freely.
Sorry for the stream of consciousness, but you always seem to find a way to spark and inspire me.
Lastly, when you described your Moms eyebrows (may she rest in peace), I laughed and thought about the Seinfeld episode when Elaine drew eyebrows on Uncle Leo.
Laura, you make me laugh and make me think.
Joe
Laura J Oliver says
Laugh and think? Then my job is done, Joe. (Laughing.) Thanks for the thoughtful response, as always.
Steven Strawn says
I am no writer, but here goes.
The older I get the less I worry about how I look or what others think of me.
What I worry about is how my only child, my son sees me.
Not for my vanity, which was rampant at a point in my life, but for how my son see me is how he sees himself in later life.
I do my best not to scare him, so I try to be the best me I can be. I need to show him how to take care of himself so he can do the same for his kids
By keeping up my appearance as best I can I hope to show him not to be afraid of my aging or scare of age itself, but to embrace it. And hope to show him how to die with grace when the time comes. This is what I feel I own him. Because of all he has given me as we grew up together
It is a tradeoff
For all he has taught me, and as long as I can, I owe him a life free of fear of losing me and what to do about me when I am no longer the way he wants and needs to remember me. I do what I can to stay fit both physically and mentally and lighten life with a lot of humor. because life really is wonderful. Maybe that’s what your mother is trying to do for you, in her own way. At least that’s what I read.