Self Image Over-Exposure
“I watched Tabitha gnawing that steak in the zoo dirt and thought: Day after day this wild animal chases dirty pink bunnies down the well-worn, narrow path they cleared for her. Never looking left or right. Never catching that damn bunny, settling instead for a store-bought steak and the distracted approval of sweaty strangers. Obeying the zookeeper’s every command, just like Minnie, the Lab she’s been trained to believe she is. Unaware that if she remembered her wildness - just for a moment - she could tear those zookeepers to shreds.”
- Excerpt from Untamed, by Glennon Doyle
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The invention of mirrors is well debated among historians, but the general consensus goes something like this:
Glass mirrors were initially developed by the Romans in the first century AD, and were later improved upon by Islamic scientists and European aristocrats. By the turn of the 4th century, a select few Chinese upperclassmen owned polished stone mirrors.
It wasn’t until the 17th and 18th centuries that mirrors became relatively commonplace. But even then, they were often either just small pieces of polished metal, or concave looking-glasses. For instance, mirror ownership in the English middle class doubled at the start of the 1700s, but at that time, mirrors were most frequently attached to candleholders, being as they were used to illuminate houses.
Fast forward to the 19th century, and mirrors were seen as a luxury item. Their usefulness proved valuable among upper-class women, who began valuing mirrors over the opinions of men or friends in order to determine their appearance and social status. Where previously, others were needed to consult or confirm a person’s looks, people were becoming more autonomous in curating their image. From that point forward, mirrors became more and more commonplace in layman’s households, and were even regarded as a symbol of freedom from slavery in the literature of the time, as slaves quarters weren’t outfitted with mirrors.
Once mirrors were ubiquitously owned, cameras began to take center stage. But cameras evolved as a part of society at a much more rapid pace: instead of centuries, we’re talking decades.
While the first camera was invented in 1816, they quickly became commonplace household objects in the 1940’s. And come 1999, the world’s first camera phone was released in Japan: the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210.
In 2003, more camera phones were sold worldwide than standalone cameras, and in 2010, the first front-facing camera phone - the iPhone 4 - was released. Instagram was released that same year, Snapchat was invented the next year, and Facetune was released one year after that.
To recap: In roughly the span of 100 years, accessibility and exposure to our own image skyrocketed beyond belief. We now have 24/7 access to a crystal clear image of ourselves, whether by full-length mirror or instagram reel. And it leaves me to wonder:
Is our sense of self distorted by over-exposure to our own images?
Without a doubt, mirrors are practical tools. There are obvious benefits to being aware of your appearance, from getting the parsley out of your teeth to combing your hair. Mirrors empower us to determine how we physically want to present ourselves to society. But while there’s no vanity in checking to see if your lipstick is fully removed, is there a limit to the benefit of knowing what we look like? Is there a line we’ve crossed when it comes to physical self-awareness? A point of diminishing returns?
It’s clear that there’s a line between necessity and vanity; between where curiosity and need shift into obsession and anxiety. But with the rise of selfies and social media, it’s obvious that line is more like a suggestion now. But if we were to take a step back from the current zeitgeist, maybe we can strike a new balance. One that’s probably not found behind the carbon fiber arm of a selfie stick.
When it comes to eating disorder recovery, I’d say finding a sense of self in recovery is like grabbing hold of a rescue buoy in choppy water. If you follow suit with the rest of society and base your identity on appearance alone, you’ll soon find that the buoy you clung onto was actually a brick. But if you choose the unpopular route of basing your sense of self on your qualities and attributes, with appearance being just one cog in the machine, I’d bet everything I hold dear that you’d float.
Years ago, I read a news article about a recovered woman who decided to give up mirrors for an entire year. As the story goes, when she got engaged, the pressure of a wedding started to tempt her to slip back into familiar anorexic tendencies. But instead of giving in, she found inspiration in the stories of medieval Roman nuns.
For the entire year (and up to her wedding day) she avoided any and all mirrors. And it turns out that it worked: she reported feeling less concerned over maintaining her personal image, and more free to fully engage with her wedding celebration. Does this mean we should all go back to pre-Roman Era and stop using mirrors? Mmm… maybe not. But it is an interesting connection to make.
So, less mirrors, more mental freedom? Perhaps. But avoiding mirrors doesn’t really change the fact that reflective objects and camera phones are e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. And while it can be tempting to lean toward the extreme end of things while in the throes of recovery, it’s important to recognize the nuance.
What I’m trying to say is this: You shouldn’t have to avoid your reflection to achieve internal peace. And when it really comes down to it, you can’t change the world; you can only change your own world: what media you consume, how many selfies you post, and whether you’re editing them or not. And most importantly, beyond the physical aspect of self image, what it really boils down to is this:
Who are you? Not apart from your appearance, nor based on your appearance alone, but:
Who are you, entirely?
Are you a size-10-jeans-wearer? Or are you a person who wears Brandy Melville? Or are you something else entirely?
Outside of your body, recovery, and disordered eating: Who are you?
Are you funny or silly? Relaxed or anxious? Daring or charming? Friendly or misanthropic? Do you like reading books? Do you sing in the shower? Have you gone on adventures, or survived trying times? Are you compassionate or loving? Do you forgive easily, or hold onto grudges? How do you treat strangers? Are you curious? What are you afraid of? Who do you love?
You are a maze of sunlit halls, and shadowy corners. You are a mixture of passions and anger and love and trepidations. You are all the things that make you feel, and all the ways in which other people feel around you.
We talk about physiognomy as if it were a window into our humanity. "A daring brow,” “a stubborn chin,” “a reserved mouth.” But without the flesh and blood of you, your image is nothing more than another Mona Lisa: intriguing… but that’s about it. In reality, you are a once-in-eternity deal. And only one, minuscule* fragment of you is captured by a camera or reflection. And yet, because we’re surrounded by such unidimensional presentations of ourselves, my hunch is:
We forget that we’re capable of so much more than an image.
I worry that, as a culture, we’re forgetting what it means to be a living, breathing human. It’s hard not to notice that the greater and more animated a woman’s online presence becomes, the more nondescript she becomes in the real world. It’s honestly stunning how socially incompetent many of the women surrounding me have become. The gem of a woman I find every so often who thinks for herself and contributes to the back and forth banter of a socially up-to-par conversation has become increasingly rare.
I’ve lived in six different states, and in each one, what I’ve noticed is this: most people my age are horribly inept at general conversation and manners. Rather than engage with the world around them, many young women have started reaching for their phones like pacifiers. It’s hard to believe that our long-standing infatuation with these palm-sized camera-computers has little to do with our generally declining social aptitude and diminishing self-confidence. I look around, and it feels like I’m surrounded by phone-dependent zombies. And I just need to know: when will we wake up?
Are we hurtling toward some breaking point in which we’ll finally recognize the overwhelmingly tranquilizing nature of consuming and creating autoeroticized media? If you have the answer, I’d really like to know. But aside from my tirade, the heart of the matter that I’ve been working towards is this:
Whether we embrace it or not, we are multidimensional creatures, not able to be fully captured by our appearance alone.
(or: “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover”)
In eating disorder recovery, it’s so vital to learn that your body does not encapsulate who you are as a human being. Recovery is enough of an uphill battle without being steeped in a culture that hyper-focuses on physicality. So, in between scrolling through meticulously-posed selfies and gazing into one of the many now-palatial bathroom mirrors, remember this: your body doesn’t measure success. It doesn’t convey obedience, acceptance, or a life well lived. Who you are is more than what meets the eye. In other words:
self image is infinitely more complex than what’s reflected in a mirror, or captured by a camera lens.
Self-image is defined by you alone. You have the option of becoming consumed by your own physical image. But although this is the popular route, it’s a shallow life to live, and there’s so much more to you beneath the surface. Instead, when you’re sitting at the crossroads of remission and relapse, debating which version of yourself you’d like to become, I’m rooting for you to choose something else entirely. If I had a vote, I’d say:
become something more than what A camera is capable of capturing.
You are more than a still life. You’re more than an image, a painting, a reflection, a post. Please don’t waste your once-in-forever existence trying to squeeze yourself into that box. While your eating disorder thrives off of you shrinking yourself down to your appearance alone, remission is found by stepping into your true self image: not just your body, but everything that sings beneath the surface.
I hope you choose to live with your image instead of as it. You are so much more than what meets the eye.
The initial scene that I quoted from Glennon Doyle’s book has a second half, and I’d like to share it with you here:
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“[If Tabitha could talk,] I knew what she’d tell me. She’d say, “Something’s off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagine fenceless, wide-open savannas. I want to run and hunt and kill. I want to sleep under an ink-black, silent sky filled with stars. It’s all so real I can taste it.”
Then she’d look back at the cage, the only home she’s ever known. She’d look at the smiling zookeepers, the bored spectators, and her panting, bouncing, begging best friend, the Lab.
She’d sigh and say, “I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist.”
I’d say:
Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah.”
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With so much love & confidence in all that you are,
Maria
