A Backwards Glance

I took a backwards selfie in the mirror the other day attempting to see if the bun I had created was going to hold together. Of course I also wanted to know how it looked. It occurred to me that when I look in the mirror I rarely look with my own eyes. Or maybe a better way to say that is that though we may be using our physical eyes to look at ourselves we usually see through the judgments of others. For some of us these judgments come from family. For others it’s a particular social or religious group, or perhaps straight up media influences.

Getting older has helped me to temper this response. It’s still there but it no longer screams like a toddler having a tantrum. I feel sexy and connected to life no matter what anyone else’s opinion of me may be. My identity is less wrapped in a cocoon of trying to be desirable to others. These days I want to be desirable to myself. But I’m not immune. None of us are. It’s just like those tests they did at Harvard showing that we are all bigoted whether we acknowledge it or not because we have all grown up in an environment that drip fed us the ugliness of bigotry.

That bigotry was often hidden in (misguided) advice about how to protect ourselves or to make ourselves feel proud about who we were by emphasizing who we were not. We still do that. We learned at society’s knee how to judge ourselves through comparisons, how to casually put others down so we could feel better about ourselves. Those who excelled at those lessons became school bullies and bosses willing to step on our throats to get ahead.

Most of us were taught to be polite but that politeness was often devoid of kindness.

It wasn’t about compassion but rather about proving we belonged and were “good” because we knew what the rules were and how to follow them. At least enough to stay out of trouble. It became more about pointing out how other people failed to follow those rules, or worse, having distain for those who didn’t know the rules. These may have been the seeds of the virtue signaling we see today — all form, no substance.

Our relationship with other humans is complex, but let’s get back to that selfie I took. How can I possibly be kind to others and stop judging them in comparison to a set of trumped up expectations if I don’t do that when I look at myself?

Cinse Bonino
2023