As a child, I was reaaaally VAIN… Like REALLY. I totally thought I had a pretty good shot at being miss india in a decade or so.. little did I know these dreams would be crushed due to being vertically challenged…. I would sit in the mirror and think “MAN. You’ze a sessual BEING!” Well.. not in those EXACT words… but you get the idea..
Well, one day, my grandmom caught me preening in front of the mirror and she said just one line –
“You know, the longer you look at yourself in the mirror, the uglier you get.”
Of course, I believed her. And I took her really seriously too! I started avoiding looking in the mirror after that, god knows how much uglier I had gotten with all those hours I racked up sitting in front of the mirror crushing on myself!
As I got older, I still kept looking into the mirror to a minimum – a quick check to make sure I got my kajal on alright and didn’t end up going out in public looking like a raccoon with a black eye or a couple of seconds spent in awkward poses to ensure I wasn’t going to accidently flash someone… you know.. the regular stuff.. This was mostly out of habit but my grandmom’s voice would still ring in my head.
Recently though, after seeing how early people start to surgically alter their appearances because they didn’t like what they saw in the mirror, I started thinking more and more about what my nana had to say and REALIZED how right she was in saying what she did.
Obviously, you can’t actually physically start getting uglier the more you gaze at your reflection in the mirror… but if you spend too much time looking at your own reflection, you’ll end up finding flaws which are not even there. (Kind of like saying a word over and over again till you think it’s a made up word..!)
SO, the next time you’re scrutinising your reflection, and you start wondering how to fix the many flaws your see… take a break and ask yourself how long you’ve been staring at yourself in the mirror.
<3
This picture does not belong to me. source: the internet.