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Not Cruel, Only Truthful
August 24, 2003, 11:50 p.m. When I was somewhere between six and eight, I remember standing in front of my bedroom mirror, looking at myself. Only I wasn’t; the girl in the mirror wasn’t me, she wasn’t what I looked like. Oh, she looked like me – dark brown hair, blue eyes, same height and size – but she wasn’t me. I looked different – I can’t say how, exactly, but the picture I had in my head of what I looked like, what my image was, wasn’t the same as the girl I saw in the mirror. She’s still inside every mirror and reflective surface I look at, and I’ve grown used to her presence. I recognise her in photos as me, but I always feel a little strange when I see her. I always feel a slight jolt as I realise the girl in my head and the girl in the mirror don’t match. Her nose is the wrong shape, her forehead’s too broad and her eyebrows are icky. I’m prettier than that, I always think. Her body’s right, it matches mine, and even if it didn’t, I wouldn’t complain. But there’s something about her face; I dislike it not so much because it’s foreign, but because it’s ugly. It’s not always ugly, but it can be, momentously so. Sometimes it’s like there’s a war between the ugly and pretty in her face. I wonder what happened to the girl whose image I have in my head. Did she ever exist, is the girl in the mirror really not the genuine me, or (and I suspect this is the truth) is she some fanciful creation of my own, an image for me to forget myself in?
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