Who's in the mirror?

A mirror can be your best friend and your worst enemy. It doesn’t live, it doesn’t die, but it’s always there watching your every move, reflecting what you do, the mirror knows more about you than you. We look at the mirror the way we want to see it, the mirror looks at us in every way possible. It’s scary but it’s comforting that someone else also knows what I know. What do we do before we leave our room, what’s the first thing we do when we enter? We look in the mirror. But who is behind that mirror? Is it me, is it you? Is it someone else altogether?

I still remember it was about the 27th of December, I woke up probably on the wrong side of the bed. My head felt dizzy, nothing mad sense all I could see was my room with nothing in it. I walked towards my mirror; it was the only thing there. I looked in but couldn’t see my reflection. I saw someone in my bed. I looked back, no one was there. The mirror still showed someone there. They got out and walked towards the mirror the same way I did. It was me, watching me in the mirror, but not the way I was used to it.

The person in the mirror was not me, it was me in another place another time. Almost as if I was in a disconnected dimension than it. I tried waving to it, and I almost looked scared. The other me was baffled. He did not understand what was happening and frankly neither did I. I tried to talk to him. I could see him holding his head as If he heard an odd noise. He realised it was me inside his head, talking to him.

He looked almost amused, I was almost proud of myself that wasn’t myself but was technically myself, so well, essentially I was proud of myself. This doesn’t make sense but if it does, I am proud of you too. I tried to understand myself from a third-person perspective, it was eye-opening I couldn’t feel myself before but now it was as if I was connected to myself while still being able to do things away from myself.

I told him that I didn’t like the way he treated himself, the way he would give up, let go of what he planned to do. I told him not to be weak, but he lashed out back at me. He said I still don’t understand what it was like to be myself. Since the thing I hated most was my expectation of myself to be better than myself. He asked why I could never take care of myself in a way that was not essentially hurtful. I told him it was all I knew. It continued, I fought myself in my head or myself fought me in his head.

Then an alarm rang, loudly almost as if it was a siren. My eyes opened wider than they ever did before, it was as if I had woken up from being awake. I had it was all a dream, I wasn’t just thinking of the reality of myself but the reality of myself that I had created in my head. A dream that changed how I looked at real life.

I went back to the mirror, but it didn’t speak to me as it did at that time. It only reflected what I said to it. So, I naturally began saying things that I wanted to hear and, because I would hear those things every single day they became what I truly thought of myself. My whole self-image changed. Who I saw in the mirror and who you saw every day was completely different, not in a bad way but in a way that made you believe that I wasn’t like I had been before yet, internally I had always been the same.

Perspective and the hope of self changed everything about the specific person. Sometimes it all starts with just a thought that we did not even really have.