I was talking about
self-image with a
friend today, and I was thinking about how when I picture myself in my mind doing something, I'm never quite clear in the
image. My image of myself is an approximation, but always fuzzy, I can never quite focus in on myself. I know that I have blond hair, blue eyes, and the approximate arrangement of my
features but the arrangement never works out. I wondered if this was
psychologically healthy for me, but then wondered, do we really know what we look like at all?
Of all the people who see you every day, you see yourself the least. Even the most dedicated to personal grooming among us spend an hour, or two at the most, staring at ourselves, and we see ourselves from one, maybe two angles in the same lighting. Your good friends and family who see you hours of the day in many different situations have an infinitely better picture of what you look like than you do. Even someone you barely know who has an hour meeting with you during the day or something knows better how you look than you do!
Then there's the psychological factor that goes into looking at yourself in a mirror. Many people instantly go into fault-finding mode: a slight blemish becomes a lesion, a small roundness of the belly is instantly huge. I would be willing to argue that the longer one spends looking in the mirror, the less aware they are of how they really look since they break their parts down to a sum of its flaws. Mirrors lie.
I'm one of those people who checks themselves out in every slightly reflective surface out there. There are several reasons for it, vanity among them, and it's one of those things that I really can't control. I also realized that there's another reason that I do this: I'm always trying to catch myself off guard, to look at myself before I realize that I'm looking at myself, to see how I really look. I've succeeded at this a few times, but the reflection has been in the transparent light of a store window, so I'm no closer to a concrete image of myself than before.