The Surprising Ways Mirrors Sabotage Your Confidence (And How To Fight Back)
Sometimes thorny social problems have elegantly simple solutions.
Faruk Tokluoglu | Canva Whenever I travel, I spend a disproportionate amount of time looking into mirrors. That’s because the mirrors at hotels and AirBnBs are often positioned under higher-wattage lighting than my dim bathroom bulb at home, and they often show me angles of myself that I’m not used to looking at.
It doesn’t particularly please me, gazing into new mirrors. During a work trip last week, I became a bit obsessed with my ever-loosening neck wattle and discovered a deep wrinkle etched into my forehead that I’d never noticed before.
I like to think that I’m aging gracefully, that I don’t care about things like wrinkles and neck wattles. The Internet, which has apparently gotten word that I’m a 40-something woman, is trying its best to prey on my socialized insecurities. As ads for anti-aging products stalk me from website to website, I refuse to get swept up in the frenzy.
The surprising ways mirrors sabotage your confidence (and how to fight back)
Dikushin Dmitry / Shutterstock
But really, all my blasé lack of concern vanishes when I look into a new mirror. You see, I have two mirrors in my house, and they both happen to be strategically positioned in low-light areas at flattering angles. Actually, there is nothing strategic about it. There are only two possible spaces for mirrors in my bathroom, and when the bulbs in the lights above our medicine cabinet mirror burned out, I never got around to replacing them.
I tend to look great in these mirrors. As such, I don’t spend a lot of time gazing into them. I do a quick check before leaving the house, making sure I don’t have food in my teeth or a flyaway hair.
I generally feel pretty smug about maintaining my self-confidence through midlife — that is, until I catch sight of myself in a mirror that refuses to flatter me.
One Airbnb bathroom had so many mirrors that I could see each sagging portion of my body reflected into infinity. It was terrifying.
Mirrors like these have sent me spiraling down Google rabbit-holes, researching creams and chemicals and noninvasive surgery options.
Then I am seized by shame because here I am, playing into it all. This stupid, pointless, expensive, time-consuming war against inevitable bodily changes, this fear of becoming invisible and irrelevant, this refusal to let go of the firm, unlined faces of our youth, and the social validation that comes with them.
But in a culture that flagrantly promotes unhealthy beauty standards for women, particularly women who have the audacity to age, is it any surprise that even the most confident among us will gaze into a too-bright, too-big, ill-positioned mirror and not feel enthusiastic about every angle of ourselves?
We don’t need to contend with the shame on top of everything else. As soon as I get away from those mirrors, I stop obsessing. Out of sight, out of mind.
My cats, I’ve noticed, have no use for mirrors. By the way they preen and parade around, I can only deduce that they always think they look like hot stuff — and nothing, or no one, ever challenges them. So why do we torture ourselves with abundant opportunities to obsess and crave and condemn?
Sometimes thorny social problems have elegantly simple solutions.
Banish your mirrors! Or at least, reduce and strategically position them. You, too, have the power to preen and parade around thinking you look like hot stuff — as long as there’s no mirror to tell you otherwise.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.
