Do You Only See Your Body Through A Fun House Mirror?

I don’t know about you but when I was little, I used to love going into a Carnival’s fun house & staring into their mirrors.

The way the mirrors distorted my body and my head fascinated me. I couldn’t help but twist and turn myself just to see what could come out of it.

I could be as tall as I wanted. I could be as short as I wanted.  I could fall somewhere in between with funny looking legs, arms and head.

Even though I knew I didn’t really look like that, I loved it and squealed with delight!

Enter puberty.

That same fun house mirror was no longer fun, no longer amusing and no longer my friend.

As self conscious as teenagers can be, that mirror did nothing to make me feel better about myself.

I wondered if I really did look like that. (I didn’t.)

I wondered when it had happened. (It never did.)

I couldn’t believe no one told me how grotesque I was. (No one ever did.)

I was sick of myself for being so gross. (I grew out of that.)

What I knew as a child about that mirror did nothing to make my teenage worries go away. I was unreasonable & inconsolable.

All that mirror did was distort my image. That’s all.

But what I did to that mirror was awful. I took to internalizing its image as the one, true representation of myself.  No one could convince me otherwise because that mirror was now the truth and everything else just a figment of my imagination.

Luckily we all grow up and, hopefully, get past being a teenager. But my question is this- have you left the image of yourself in that fun house mirror behind?

Can you see yourself in the mirror?

I mean really see yourself? Without criticism? Without disgust? Without complete fear & apprehension?

Have you been able to drop the fun house mirror image behind you?

Or are you still seeing yourself, your body, your features right through the eyes of that fun house mirror?

Don’t be surprised to hear that many grown adults suffer from this problem.

It’s sometimes just as simple as a case of being overly critical of yourself & your body. When it’s this simple, you eventually snap yourself out of it. You can recognize that and turn away from the mirror.

But when it gets more serious, when that fun house mirror starts to take up residence in your own home- all the time- that’s when its really time to take a step back.

The decision becomes yours.  Do you choose to see yourself, not as a perfect image, but as your true self?  Or do you need to see the distorted, fun house mirror image?

We all have those distorted mirror days- days where we feel like we’re back to being really, really tall or really, really short.  We feel like we’re back to those days when our body parts don’t fit on our body and our head feels too big to balance on top of our shoulders.  That’s to be expected.

The only option we have is to stop, take a breath and step back from the mirror.  Chances are if you look again in 5 minutes, you’ll see your own face smiling back at you completely normal and the distortion would have faded away.

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