Mirror Phase, Extended (Why I Write)
Yesterday I picked up a full-length mirror I found on Facebook Marketplace. $25, Ikea, used (like new), was not a bad deal for what I would receive in exchange — the chance to confront my face every morning, still blank and confused, vision fuzzy without flimsy contacts to correct it. As I hauled this mirror down to the subway platform, I let it face outwards. I thought to myself, “I am holding a mirror up to the world.”
I have been asking myself why I write—a question first posed by George Orwell in his now-famous essay—and this feels like a sufficient answer.
Shakespeare said writing shows nature “her own feature, to scorn her own image.” But let me be candid — no one looked into my mirror. It didn’t take long before I flipped it on myself, presenting reddened eyes, the beginning of a zit on my chin covered by an over-worn mask. I know this subject best.
And as I stared at my face, foreign in the both harsh and dim lights of the subway, I understood: I want to believe my writing reflects the world, her atrocities, her flowers, as though my body has dissolved and I am just a full-length mirror standing on the subway. But at best, this mirror is a vanity, and my face takes up most of the image.
My mom’s favorite Hemingway quote goes like this: “there is nothing to writing,” she grins, eager to deliver a punchline I’ve already memorized, “all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” I’m turned off by the melodrama, but I take his point — that writing is as corporeal as it is cerebral, that some part of the stuff coursing through you will show up on the page.
For me, writing is waking up and looking in the mirror. When I write the words both reflect me — my atrocities, my flowers — and construct me. In other words, I most enjoy writing when I encounter a part of myself I wasn’t familiar with, catch flying thoughts between my hands, or make my own subtext legible. But my relationship with writing has been complicated by age and circumstance.
At fifteen years old, I opened a Word document, called it “journal,” and asked myself “Am I just another example of teenage angst? Oh, woe is me.” I saved it to a folder titled “miscellaneous,” sharing a home with other sporadic journal entries I hope never to encounter again. I hoped to bury that image of myself — nervous and tired, eager to find my place in the family of things — under essays on Animal Farm and the Articles of Confederation. Yet some part of me wanted these fleeting portraits to crystalize, in case I needed to remember, to bear witness to who I was and still am. And I have — they read as oddly performative for a private journal, seeking resolutions in platitudes, hoping to urge a more refined, finalized version of myself into existence. I say things like “mere” and “mustn’t,” a vocabulary mostly borrowed from The Diary of Anne Frank, which I had recently finished. Reading her words, so clever and quoted, struck me with the egotistical idea that could only originate from a teenager’s brain: what if my diaries are read, or even published, after I die? What if my diaries are all that’s left?
In When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams’ dying mother grants her possession of her journals, three shelves of them, but they are all empty. She tells her reader that “in Mormon culture, women have two responsibilities: keep a journal and bear children” (5). Williams admits that she will never know why her mother bought journal after journal, year after year, never wrote in them, and still passed them on. But within them, she takes a pencil to paper, writing and erasing several contradicting truths: “My Mother’s Journals are the power of absence. My Mother’s Journals are the power of presence” (11). I wonder if her mother was planning this gesture, so ripe with meaning, or if the journals accumulated as a performed adherence to cultural duty, a way to feign belonging. I wonder if she wrote them with invisible ink.
Williams spends her entire book asking questions like these, but I couldn’t help but refract it through my own experience, offering an over-simplified answer: her mother was afraid to look in the mirror. This is my problem. I want to call myself a writer because fleeting phrases are constantly taking shape in my head, but I am scared to make them permanent, horrified that the way they look and sound will reflect something ugly and unsophisticated. I avoid the mirror, unwilling to meet my own gaze.
I’ve always wanted to keep a journal, to have the privacy to write everything down without concern for my ideas’ logic or complexity, but it has become a contested space. When I write, I imagine someone twenty years from now, reading my words over a cup of coffee in a reclining chair and shaking their head, spilling drops and not even bothering to wipe them off. I learn again and again that the reader is me, and I am far more empathetic when given the benefit of time. But it does not bring me to write.
Still, I am spurred on every few months by the anxiety brought on by forgetting, knowing I have forgotten so much already — the quadratic formula, the words to my favorite Maya Angelou poem, the way my dad answered the phone.
My grief counselor insisted on writing, promising things would leave me, shutting the door so quietly I wouldn’t be disturbed until I noticed their absence. Yet I hesitated against summarizing my dad in emotionally-charged journal entries, fearing my own incompetence as a writer would transfigure him into the last thing I wanted him to become: one-dimensional and stagnant, no longer interacting with the living realm. I hoped writing him down and doing it well would immortalize him, extending beyond the flattened descriptions I heard even from those who knew him best: he was a good man. A kind man. A family man. Yes, but what else?
His gravestone reads: “he loved and was loved,” the passive voice subtracting my family from the equation and implying finitude that does not exist. This kind of writing, carved and impenetrable, felt like a second death. I swore this mistake wouldn’t be made again. So instead I think regularly about the donuts and chocolate milk we ate at the grocery store and clutch an old list — bananas, milk (x2), honey nut cheerios — our handwriting mixed together, the sheet of paper soft and pulpy in my hands. I find these small, apparently unfeeling words, written with only utilitarian intentions, resonate more than any sweeping essay I could concoct.
I’ve taken to collecting them, receiving a Word of the Day in my inbox at 11:30 AM. Sometimes I’ve just stepped out of the shower, wrapped in a worn towel, the air thick with steam. Other times I’m pouring out the last drops of a pot of coffee, now room temperature, and diluting it with skim milk. Wherever I am, Dictionary.com finds me, saying Good Morning, Here’s One Opportunity for You to Better Yourself. First I opened them out of guilt, but the words became relevant and exciting.
I screenshot the ones that strike me. Sometimes when I am bored of what my phone has to offer I scroll through my camera roll, rereading their definitions, squeezing my eyes shut, and attempting to commit them to memory. Here are a few: yare (quick; agile; lively), blatherskite (a person given to empty talk), idiolect (a person’s individual speech pattern).
These are words I do not say aloud but keep to myself, to stare at in awe of their exactness, their rarity. They are antiques; I am a hoarder. And yet: I have met blatherskites. Occasionally, I am one. I feel validated — yes, there is a word for this, so I must not be the only slugabed. No, I do not experience metrophobia, but there must be people who do, and now I can be more accommodating of them. In words like these, I see faces and feelings reflected back at me; they are truisms held in small cases.
I string them together in fleeting phrases that become a poem, one written in my head before it finds paper. There I can write without the rationalizing structures of prose, without the pressure to craft a narrative where resolution does not exist. There I have space to talk about the conch shells my dad unstuck from the Atlantic without justifying these words’ importance.
It is in these microscopic retellings that I locate myself: in poems about small boobs and prom dresses, artifacts of my existence that I read again and again, porous enough to produce new discoveries in an act both selfish and regenerative.
Yet often I have the same experience with phrases that are not my own, the closest I’ve come to a universal. I find these words mingled together in a sentence arranged so well I repeat it under my breath and scrawl it on napkins, only to cross it out and write it again. “You do not have to be good” says Mary Oliver, and while I do not know what she means by good, I cling onto her words, reflecting light and faces like tiny mirrors.
