The magic mirror

The prompt for today (day 37 of 61 of the Daisy Yellow Index Card a Day challenge) is metallic. So I made a color wheel and cut it apart and attached it to a representation of a mirror, which is a metallic surface. When I attached it to the “mirror,” I realized that each color looked as if it were trying to run away, to not see itself reflected in that thing that tells no lies. It shows our every flaw, and we are insecure because we have been told that those flaws are us. I am talking in the first person plural here because I have no doubt that I am not the only person in the world to be offered negative commentary about how I look.

At first, it’s other people who are offering the negative commentary and then, it’s the mirror, saying it over and over again and laughing gleefully. We look into the mirror and we absorb the message and we become the message. And then, we don’t want to look into the mirror, except to make sure that our hair isn’t sticking straight up or doing other odd and annoying things. We have lost our love for that metallic surface that we had when we were babies and had just discovered our own reflections.

How many of us don’t like to see our reflection in the mirror? We watch television and movies, and we see an image of the people with the “perfect looks” (tall and gorgeous and never needing eyeglasses) on television, in magazines, on billboards, and anywhere there is room to post a photograph of that perfect person. We never ask why we are defined by our physical appearance. We want to know why we don’t look like that “perfect person.”

Imagine if the wonderful qualities that were inside of us were to burst to the surface, like that white light that breaks apart into a rainbow of colors. Our creativity may bounce out of us or our organizational skills or our analytical minds or maybe something else? And, like in the image of the split-apart color wheel that I created, our wonderful traits that make us uniquely ourselves, will dance out of us joyfully, no longer hiding behind a surface image that may or may not achieve that “perfect look.” Because we really are more than a face in the mirror or in the crowd.