Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall

by Kjerstin Gruys

  Hanna and I both agreed that my official “year without mirrors” ought to begin retroactively, on March 25, 2011, the day that I had first thought of the idea. A retroactive start date may sound suspicious, since I hadn’t yet begun avoiding mirrors, but this choice was very important; I wanted my project to emphasize thoughtful self-improvement instead of perfection, and beginning the year with my first tiny steps in the right direction, however small, reinforced this intention. In the same spirit, this meant that if I happened to falter at any point throughout the year—either by seeing myself by accident or in a moment of weakness—instead of quitting or beating myself up, I would do my best to mindfully learn from my mistake and keep moving forward. After all, avoiding mirrors was not itself my be-all-end-all goal, but a means to a greater end: I wanted an improved relationship with my body.

  I also knew that there were risks to waiting. Just as yo-yo dieters tend to binge on junk food just before beginning their diets, I could see myself “binging” on vanity at the last minute. Sephora shopping sprees and Glamour Shots portrait sessions were not in my best interest, emotionally or financially.

  After hanging up the phone with Hanna, I reviewed my notes and wrote out a finalized list of rules:

  My no-mirrors project started on March 25, 2011, and will end on March 24, 2012.

  Any and all reflective surfaces count.

  Virtual mirrors (i.e., photos, videos, Skype videos, etc.) also count.

  I will use my rearview and side mirrors when driving, but not for checking myself out.

  I’m allowed to see my shadow.

  Reading over what I’d written forced me to consider the enormity of the changes I would be making in my life. For years I’d gravitated toward my reflection without thinking; every mirror, every store window—not to mention the occasional piece of well-shined cutlery—had been another chance to assess the goods. Succeeding at going a full year without mirrors wouldn’t be as easy as simply avoiding them; I would have to retrain my very instincts. If I managed to change my behavior around mirrors, would this, in turn, lead to changes in my thinking?

  This wasn’t the usual order of things. Typically, behavioral changes are the goal, with changed thinking as the first step. Indeed, an entire field of contemporary evidence-based psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, is based on the premise that changing maladaptive thinking leads to changes in feelings and behavior. And this idea isn’t even particularly modern. Lao-tzu, sixth century BC philosopher and founder of Taoism, wrote the following:

  Watch your thoughts, they become your words.

  Watch your words, they become your actions.

  Watch your actions, they become your habits.

  Watch your habits, they become your character.

  Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

  Clearly, common thinking insisted that thoughts shaped behavior, but I was betting on the opposite. By focusing first on action, my project would have me skipping a few of Lao-tzu’s oft-quoted steps. At the very least I would jumble their order. I hoped that my path would instead follow the wisdom of Harry S. Truman, who said, “Actions are the seed of fate. Deeds grow into destiny.”

  I knew that my habits couldn’t change overnight, so I decided to dedicate the first month of my project to transition. Over the next three weeks I would examine the practical details involved in navigating a world without my reflection, from plotting out all of the mirrors (and reflective surfaces, and virtual mirrors) I encountered in a typical day, so that I could find reasonable solutions for handling every one of them, to teaching myself how to apply makeup, style my hair, put in my contact lenses, and choose outfits without seeing myself.

  In terms of strategizing, I decided to start small. Before tackling the entire world of mirrors, I would focus on the ones in my home. I counted seven: two in my bedroom, one in my bathroom, three in the living room, and a wall of mirrors that lined one side of my building’s foyer. It seemed important that Michael and I work together to figure out exactly how I would do this. We’d be living in the same place soon, and Michael wasn’t planning to give up mirrors as well. Supportive as he was of my project and its goals, I sensed that he was worried about how it might impact his life, not to mention our relationship.

  Like me, Michael is a worrier, a people-pleaser, and a perfectionist. He likes drawing diagrams and has a penchant for using unneeded and typically inexact similes to explain his thinking, even for basic concepts. (This drives me crazy!) Despite fancying himself to be a free-spirited, laid-back guy at heart, he is admittedly more risk-averse than me, and is extremely wary of hastily made decisions. He’d been paralyzed by indecisiveness when we’d begun talking about getting engaged. I’ll never forget the time he’d plaintively whined, “I’m one hundred percent certain that I would be happy spending the rest of my life with you, but deciding to get married is so overwhelming. This would be so much easier if you just got pregnant. If you were pregnant, I’d marry you tomorrow!” Luckily, I wasn’t impatient enough to test his hypothesis, and, sure enough, a few months later he signed us up for that fateful Diamond Dash contest.

  Despite Michael’s wariness of big decisions, I’ve never doubted his love for me, or his commitment to our relationship; I just hate waiting around while he figures out stuff that I already know. Anyway, the point of all of this is to explain why I wasn’t surprised when Michael wanted to help sort out the details of my no-mirrors plan. Despite his initial enthusiasm, he seemed anxious to know exactly what would be involved. So we made plans for a special Friday-night strategizing date. (Yes, we make plans to make plans.)

  After scoring a prime people-watching table at our favorite neighborhood bar, we ordered a first round of drinks and settled into our seats. To get started, Michael drew a diagram on the back of a drink menu listing all of the mirrors I’d encounter before leaving my condo. We decided to try tackling them in the same order that I would encounter them on my way out the door each morning. Unfortunately, we got stuck on the first one.

  Almost an entire wall of my bedroom was made up of mirrors. I had one of those very large sliding-door closets in my bedroom, and both closet doors were mirrored. This meant that when I woke up in the morning, if I were to sit up in bed and look straight ahead, I’d be staring directly at myself in a really huge freaking mirror. I’m not sure what you look like when you wake up, but I can tell you that looking into this mirror was not the best way to start my day. Thankfully, I was already in the habit of looking away from this mirror first thing in the morning, but that usually lasted only as long as my glasses stayed off of my face.

  Michael and I tried brainstorming ideas for how to make this particularly huge and poorly placed mirror a nonissue. His first suggestion was to “close the blackout shades in the bedroom and never, ever turn on the lights.” He exuberantly wrote the words pitch dark! on the diagram and drew a line linking his words to where he had scribbled closet mirror.

  I immediately assumed that he was joking and took offense. Was Michael mocking the whole project? I wasn’t amused, and it showed in my face. I took a big gulp of beer and then said, “Ummm . . . can’t we, like, brainstorm some practical solutions?”

  Michael hadn’t been kidding. Oops.

  Obviously, Michael and I had brought to the table dramatically different ideas about what our brainstorming date would entail. I’d imagined that we’d work together to come up with ideas, which I would then give a yea or nay. In other words, he’d be welcome to pitch, but I’d be the umpire calling the strikes. Michael, on the other hand, had recently gone through some formal training on creative brainstorming at work, and my plans apparently broke the cardinal rule of brainstorming sessions, which was that ideas should never be critiqued in the beginning stages. According to Michael, early criticisms disrupt the flow of ideas. My knee-jerk scoffing had offended him and kind of hurt his feelings. I felt embarrassed to be the jerk, but als
o a little defensive; it was my project, right? If I wanted to be the umpire, I should be allowed!

  I made the mistake of saying as much, which prompted Michael to suggest that, if it was indeed my project, perhaps he ought to just let me do it however I want and not be involved at all. The increasingly tipsy control freak in me found the idea slightly tempting, but I knew that this was just his knee-jerk reaction to my knee-jerk reaction. Besides, up until that minute, I’d really been looking forward to making plans with Michael for the project. I needed his support and wanted his involvement. Besides, the last thing I needed was to piss off the guy responsible for telling me if I was leaving the house with arugula in my teeth! Embarrassed, I apologized.

  “April Fools?” I added weakly at the end, wiggling my eyebrows in hopes that I might produce a laugh. He rolled his eyes and accepted my apology, but I could tell he was still kind of disappointed.

  We tried to start over, but couldn’t quite find that brainstorming groove we’d both been romanticizing. Maybe that teamwork I thought we’d perfected during our engagement ring race still had a few kinks to work out. Still, we chipped away at the plans for a few minutes and figured out a few things.

  First, I’d hang a curtain in front of our bathroom mirror, which would allow Michael to uncover the mirror when he needed to see himself. I silently wondered if he’d remember to recover the mirror at the same rate that he remembered to put the toilet seat down (90 percent fail), but decided against mentioning it. I also wondered whether I’d be able to create curtains that actually looked cool, and not like a puppet show was about to commence above my sink.

  Second, to avoid the full wall of mirrors in the entryway to our condo building, I would be taking the back stairs to get to my car from that day forward. I felt seriously bummed that I wouldn’t be able to pick up my mail from the front hall anymore. This had long been a daily pleasure of mine, my version of a scratch-off lotto ticket; even if most of what came were bills, those “just because” handwritten letters from my grandmothers were priceless. I consoled myself by envisioning the murderous thighs (à la GoldenEye’s Xenia Onatopp) I’d earn after eleven months of climbing nine extra stairs each day. More important, this tactic completely solved a major mirror obstacle.

  By this point, Michael and I were still at the bar, but our brainpower was fading (glucose shortage?), and we were both sick of talking about mirrors. Michael suggested that we try another round of brainstorming in a day or two, and joked that we ought to use dry-erase markers to draw a massive brainstorming diagram on—what else—the huge mirrored closet doors in my bedroom. I loved the idea and agreed to call it a night.

  • • •

  ON THE FOLLOWING EVENING, A SATURDAY, MICHAEL AND I joined a group of friends for a birthday celebration in L.A.’s Koreatown. It was a flavorful gogigui (“grill your own meat”) extravaganza, and the guest of honor was Dave Frederick, a friend of mine from UCLA who I’d collaborated with on a research project about weight-based prejudice. I admired Dave for his wry and silly sense of humor along with his encyclopedic knowledge of research on body image and cultural perceptions of attractiveness. Also in attendance were Dave’s fiancée, Erica; Andrew, a psychology grad student who I’d taught with in the Sex and Gender course for the past two years; and our friend Ana, who worked for UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. We made a delightfully nerdy and almost-but-not-quite-rowdy bunch.

  Over bowls of spicy kimchi, bulgogi beef, and galbi short ribs, we caught up on one another’s lives and made sloshing beer toasts to Dave’s soon-approaching graduation. I brought up my no-mirrors project and, in doing so, subjected myself to an onslaught of well-meaning teasing.

  “So you’ll have no way of knowing if you have food on your face?! I’m going to mess with you all the time. This will be fun!” Andrew joked, making “You’ve got a booger hanging out of your nose” hand signals in jest.

  “How will you do your makeup?” asked Ana.

  “What about reflective surfaces?” asked Erica.

  “You should start a blog!” suggested Dave.

  A blog? “I’m not so sure about blogging. I’ve never even read one,” I responded.

  “You built your own webpage for your research, right?” he continued.

  I nodded warily. His enthusiasm was becoming slightly contagious.

  “Well, it can’t be much harder than that. Aha! You could call it Mirror, Mirror OFF the Wall!” Nods and murmurs of agreement circulated around the table.

  I took a cooling gulp of my beer and said I’d think about it. As much as I loved the title Dave suggested, I wasn’t sure I wanted to put myself out there on the Web. I didn’t know anything about blogging (unless you counted watching the movie Julie & Julia) other than that it was something other people did, specifically other people who not only had mad computer skills, but also were capable of writing something almost every day that was interesting enough or funny enough that other people actually wanted to read it. It sounded like a lot of work and unnecessary pressure. I was great at scribbling in my journals, but the private nature of journaling allowed me to do it haphazardly (i.e., whenever I felt like it) and—most important—without concern for my grammar or spelling, much less entertaining an audience! One thing at a time, I told myself. Blogging could wait.

  • • •

  OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS I STARTED TO PUT MY PLANS into practice. Any mirrors I could cover up at home were covered, and the rest I learned to avoid. I practiced the two-mile walking commute from my condo to my office at UCLA, mapping out all of the major mirrors and reflective surfaces in my mind. I trained myself to look straight ahead during my walk to work; if I glimpsed my reflection in my view or peripheral vision, I turned away as quickly as I could. To get used to this, I began pretending that my reflection was a person I didn’t want to talk to, avoiding eye contact with myself the same way one might avoid eye contact with an annoying or unpleasant acquaintance. In doing this, I realized that there was an important distinction between accidentally seeing my reflection (and then immediately looking away) and intentionally looking at it; the former would sometimes be unavoidable, but the latter was in my control.

  I even went so far as to figure out exactly which public restrooms in my building had stall doors that didn’t open facing a mirror. I also realized that my days of aspirational window-shopping were coming to an end; my heart sank as my wallet rejoiced.

  I knew that once my transition month was over, I’d have to rely on hanger appeal and comfort to dress myself, so I tried on every garment of clothing in my closet and weeded out anything ill-fitting or out-of-date. I was relieved to confirm that my wash-and-wear haircut looked identical whether I combed it out in front of a mirror or in front of a curtain (or not at all, for that matter). The only practical task that remained was training myself to apply my makeup.

  As an academic (in training), I was lucky to be working in an environment that was fairly ambivalent when it came to grooming expectations. UCLA’s Department of Sociology is a relaxed-but-professional place that purports to value minds more than bodies. In fact, some folks in my department seem mildly suspicious of people who seem too put-together, as though the time spent styling hair or putting on makeup (or wearing deodorant or making sure your socks match) was time that could have been spent—ahem, should have been spent—theorizing about the workings of the world. I enjoyed an even more relaxed “Just be yourself, so long as it doesn’t involve stripper-heels” dress code for my volunteer work at About-Face.

  It was a far cry from my three-year stint working in the fashion industry. In that world I’d felt scrutinized for being “too cerebral.” (Cue Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada complaining about hiring the “smart fat girl.”) And I’ll never forget the look of disdain on my VP’s face when I returned from a style-scouting exercise with a jacket I’d found on clearance at T.J.Maxx. Going back to grad school had been a welcome
change in terms of my body image and sense of style. It was infinitely more fun to be on the cooler side of geek than on the geekier side of cool!

  Knowing this about myself, I wasn’t interested in completely losing the “cool” in my “cooler side of geek” persona during my year without mirrors. I knew that my love for fashion would persist, even if I couldn’t see myself wearing it. Nevertheless, I decided that this would be a good year to rely on dependable, classic ensembles rather than chasing trends.

  Similarly, I wanted to keep wearing makeup because—even if I couldn’t see it, and even if I wore much less—I knew that the routine of applying makeup itself would help me feel like myself. Before the project started, I was wearing makeup almost every day. I even wore it on weekends and on days when I worked from home. Somehow it just made me feel more fully put together. I also knew that not wearing any makeup was likely to make me feel hyper-self-conscious. Giving up mirrors and makeup at the same time would have been too much change at once.

  I wrote out a list of everything I was accustomed to putting on my face each morning and how I applied everything, in order of application:

  SPF 30 sunscreen (rubbed on with my fingers)

  Liquid foundation (applied with a foundation brush)

  Concealer (applied with a concealer brush)

  Powder blush (applied with a blush brush)

  Two neutral eye shadows (applied with an eye shadow brush)

  Eyeliner (applied with an eyeliner brush)

  Waterproof mascara (after curling my lashes)

  Lip gloss (dabbed on with my finger)

  I had to laugh at myself when I read over the list. I wore all this to look naturally pretty!? I clearly had plenty of room to downsize. I sifted through my wares, and the sheer enormity of my makeup collection revealed lots of duplicate products, as well as plenty of things I’d purchased on a whim, to be used only once or twice, or never. It didn’t matter that I could apply all of the above in ten minutes or less; precise applications and multiple fancy brushes weren’t going to work without mirrors. I was also in the habit of frequently changing up my “looks” depending on the day’s plans, my outfit, or even my mood. It was fun to experiment with different colors of eye shadow or shades of lip gloss, but this practice, too, would be abandoned during my no-mirrors project. I needed to master one look that I could use every single day—and for every possible occasion—over the next eleven months. It needed to be both basic and classic.