Our inner mirrors distort how we perceive ourselves and others as well

My eyesight has gone through many metamorphoses as I’ve gone through life. It began with receiving my first pair of sparkly pink cat-eye glasses in second grade, progressed to higher-strength wire rims in seventh, and even stronger contact lenses in high school. I finally got Lasik surgery seven years ago, which miraculously undid forty years of fuzzy vision in about ten minutes flat. But now that I fixed the myopia — oy vey! Now I need reading glasses to decipher those teensy, pesky letters in my bentscher. ...

And it seems to me the passing years have affected my vision in other ways as well. At age thirteen, I was an eighth-grade fashionista, poring over magazines and pattern books, with eyes that had 20/20 vision for the subtlest nuances of style and the minutest fashion transgressions!  But now that I’m the middle-aged mother of four daughters, clocking countless hours shlepping through clothing stores with them, a funny thing has happened to my eyesight: I’ve lost all ability to distinguish what’s stylish, at least from a teenage point of view!!

Oh, I get the rough outlines okay — like that this year ruffles are good, and that some years flowers are nerdy and other years not (maybe they’re okay with ruffles?). But when my daughter says she needs a black skirt, well, I dutifully prune six black skirts off the rack, and she nixes all of them based on assorted miniscule details that flew right under my radar. Conclusion: I’m no longer able to read the fine print of fashion!

Maybe by now I’ve just watched so many fashions come and go (think peasant blouses, tie-dye, wedge heels) that over-focusing my fashion eyes all those years has left me with blurry vision. Or maybe I’ve just been out of the style loop for too long — I’ve been busy with considerably more weighty matters, like what’s for dinner and the baby’s next diaper.

Then again, despite losing my vision where fashion is concerned, I seem to have developed sharper vision in other areas. For example, recently my daughters were discussing how old one of their teachers is. “She’s, like, maybe forty,” one of them said.

“Nah, she has a lot of married kids, she must be in, like, her sixties,” said the other.

I realized that my daughters are all but incapable of distinguishing between forty and sixty. Middle-aged married folks like their parents are all clumped into one undifferentiated blob, one they don’t see as having much relevance to their teenage lives (except for conveniently footing the bill for their yeshiva and the mall). For me though, even the differences between seventy and eighty and ninety stand out much more clearly than they did twenty years ago.

It’s kind of like walking through those amusement park funhouses, where you pass from one mirror to another. In one your head is enormous, and in the next it’s your stomach, and after that your legs look ten feet tall, and finally you look like a midget. Depending on what mirror you’re using to look at life, different aspects blow up in proportion or shrink.

As a sixteen year old, for example, I’d look at photos of myself through my insecure, hyper-self-critical eyes, and see only disaster — hair not smooth enough! Skin not clear enough! An extra pound on the waistline, oh horrors! Today I can look at the same photos and marvel at how good I looked!

Another example: when I first started writing, I felt so proud to have become a published author. I looked in the mirror and saw myself blown up larger than life! But as I continued to write, and began paying closer attention to the skill it takes to pull off top-flight literature, the more I realized how far I lag behind the real masters of the craft. This moved me right along to the next funhouse mirror — the one where you suddenly look like a midget.

Same thing when I began to penetrate the frum world. I used to look in the mirror and feel more or less satisfied that the person reflected back was of average, maybe even better-than-average moral proportions. Wasn’t I a nice person, a person who voted and conscientiously, who put recyclables into the right bin, a person who didn’t show up to a dinner invitation without bringing a gift? Then I began meeting people whose hearts and consciences dwarfed my own, people who were able to lavish love on a dozen children and still find time for longwinded conversations with truth-seekers while wrapping up Shabbos packages for patients in hospitals. Again I found myself looking into a new mirror, where my dismayed eyes viewed a considerably more squashed version of myself.

I guess it’s not just a question of age, of how far you’ve progressed through the funhouse. It’s also the fact that our inner mirrors distort how we perceive ourselves and others as well. The waviness of the surface is produced by our own inner ego-bubbles, need-ripples, and insecurity-valleys. Maybe if we can straighten out our inner worlds, the mirror with show us the outer world with greater fidelity.

At the end of 120 years Hashem will show us our true reflection. And that isn’t how we looked to ourselves, but how we look reflected in His eyes.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 254)