#mirrors

In the last few months, life has been busy, hence getting out of the habit of blogging.

I’ve been working on A Justified Death (Margaret Demeray 5), and with Liz on Death in a Dinner Jacket (Booker and Fitch book 6). Both are now available for pre-order. That’s on top of a day job which is pretty trying (apply your knowledge of British understatement here); adult child wrangling; elderly parent/in-law wrangling; sad news from friends; talks; current global affairs.

Perhaps because I’m smouldering a bit at the edges, my eyes were recently drawn to a list of suggestions to counteract burnout. One took me right back to being six years old and Trixie and Trina:

Escape through the mirror and swap places with your mirror self.

Perhaps a year or so before I was six, my father read me an unabridged version of Alice Through The Looking-Glass and I loved it. To a girl who hated trousers and climbed trees in skirts; who got into trouble for backchat; who talked to animals, Alice was a kindred spirit, a role model and an inspiration.

Do we need trousers to have adventures? No! We can do it in frilly dresses.

Here’s a talking rabbit asking us to follow him. Let’s go!

Here’s a looking-glass we can step through. Let’s do it!

If I could have followed Alice through that mirror, I would have.

Perhaps that’s why I met/invented Trixie and Trina.

I’d recently moved school and my friend-making skills were terrible, so to begin with I was lonely and the target of older boys who’d threaten me, chase me and call me names. I reported it, but the teachers gave the standard response of the time: ‘Just keep away from them’.

I tried. I found a place to hide away: a corner by a glass door which was slightly shadowed, so I could see my reflection. In the absence of any other friend, I named my mirror self Trixie and my physical self Trina (or maybe the other way round). I decided we were twins who’d been forcibly separated and were stuck on either side of the reflection, desperate to rejoin each other.

We’d chat about bullies and loneliness and how we could be reunited. At least I think we did. I can’t really remember more than the names and sitting there talking to my reflection.

Eventually the bullies found me – clearly proving them right about how weird I was – and yanked me up by my anorak hood, nearly strangling me. I like to think a teacher spotted it and they were punished but can’t recall that either. I just knew it wasn’t safe to hide out of sight any more.

I started to make friends… and then after a couple of years moved schools again, which is another story. For a while, illogically, I felt guilty that I’d never gone back to visit Trixie/Trina before I left, that I never said goodbye. I half wondered if she remained trapped. Or if I had. After all, who’s to say which of us was stuck behind a reflection?

At nine years old, in a different place entirely, I forgot her and became fascinated by looking for ways into other worlds through the countryside near my new home. This was probably partly inspired Alan Garner’s books, but I like to think was partly instinctive as my ancestry comes chiefly from (in alphabetical not percentage order) Eire, England, Scotland and Wales.

It isn’t a good idea to cross into the realms of the Sidhe/Elves/Seelie/Tylwyth Teg nor to let them cross into ours. That’s why there are festivals and traditions around solstices and equinoxes, and an eerie edge to dawn and dusk when the wall between worlds is thin and the danger to humans is highest. But I didn’t realise that then.

Well before I heard of quantum physics, I sensed another world was just out of reach and all I had to do was find a way in. Was this because there really are other universes running alongside ours and I somehow knew it instinctively, or because I wanted to escape my reality? I don’t know, but I looked in the woods and the river for another couple of years without thinking of looking in mirrors instead.

By thirteen, the main ‘other’ world I yearned for was adulthood where I’d be in control, and mirrors were only for despairing over what I looked like in. While waiting for magical adulthood, I created alternative universes in my head and wrote about them: time-slips, fairy courts, aliens, ghosts. Of course, adult life didn’t turn out quite as controllable as I’d expected and I wish I still had the face and figure I used to about, but what teenager realises they’ll ever feel like that?

Then last week, when I was looking for something cheerful to counteract global politics, and read about avoiding burn-out by swapping places with one’s mirror self, I suddenly remembered Trixie/Trina and wondered what would happen if I sought her out to exchange realities.

When the bullies hauled her away from her side of the glass what happened next? I wondered. Is her world better or worse? Has she changed or stayed the same?

I remembered her as a small thin six year old with blonde hair, scabby knees and an anxious, serious, worried expression.

Now presumably, she’d be middle-aged, plump, greying with a pragmatic smile and sense of her own ridiculousness.

But what if she was no longer be my exact reflection but a different person after all these years of separation?

What if she were no longer there at all?

I looked at the news again, then the list of suggestions, then back at the news. We live in a world where everything – not just me – seems to be burning out.

If I could climb onto a mantelpiece and enter a mirror and risk what was on the other side of the reflection, I thought, would I?

Would you?

(Actually, if you do it, can you pull me up? I’m not sure my knees could manage climbing onto a mantlepiece any more.)

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Through_the_looking_glass_and_what_Alice_found_there_(1897)_(14779323804).jpg

I sometimes think vampires have it easy.

OK, so everyone fears and loathes them. But they always look good and never have to look in a mirror. In fact they can’t. Lucky vampires.

I tend not to look in mirrors after I’ve done my hair and make-up and checked the lumpiness factor of whatever I’m wearing (or should I say, whether my clothes disguise the lumpiness factor). After that, I do my best to avoid mirrors entirely until bed-time. That way I can preserve a mental image of myself looking neat and in control.

Of course, it can and does backfire. One year, at end of year review time, I took a train to meet my line manager. End of year reviews involve extolling one’s own virtues, justifying and analysing one’s actions etc. For an introvert, this is a fairly agonising process, but has to be done. After several years of it, I’ve got used to the drill. For a while I sat on the train reading what I’d prepared and then worked, editing some paperwork with a red pen. A young couple got on board and started looking round for seats. The train was busy and they were going to be separated. So I picked up my things and offered to move so they could sit together. Naturally, this altruistic move was accompanied by everything slipping. Rather than arising in one swift, sophisticated move, I got up in a tangle of bags, papers, coats and self. Without saying thank-you the young couple got down to canoodling while I concentrated on organising myself for the review.

At the office, I went to the loo and washed my hands etc in order to give my inner actress time to emerge for her annual performance. I purposely ignored the mirror because I didn’t want my confidence to be diminished by discovering that my hair was a mess, that I’d rubbed off half my eye make-up and that I looked podgy and vague. Imagining myself immaculate and confident, I then walked in to the room where my line manager was, primed to blow my own trumpet for ten minutes or so. ‘I have done a difficult job for several months and am finally moving forward. I am an efficient and conscientious employee. I am…’

‘Why have you drawn all over your face?’ said my line manager.

Turned out that while moving seats in the train, my red editing pen was pointing the wrong way and I had scribble all over my right cheek.

After that did I start looking in mirrors more often? No.

Is this because I’m convinced that I always look immaculate, confident and sophisticated? No.

I know what I look like really.

Do I wish I looked different? Well of course I do. I wish I looked younger, prettier, slimmer, less grey, taller. I see photographs of myself and sigh. I stand next to my lovely daughter in her trendy clothes and mourn for my long lost youthful figure.

But then I think to myself… even when I was young and slim and not grey, I still wished I looked different. The long long lost youthful figure was generally cluttered up with frumpy clothes (partly because of prevailing fashion and partly because of lack of confidence). My hair was tortured with perms (again partly because of prevailing fashion but also because I thought it was too straight). I worried about make-up. I despaired. I looked too young and too short. Bits of my figure were out of proportion. No-one noticed the tiny waist because of the full bust. No-one would ever find me attractive. I would never be successful because I didn’t look right.

Have you seen the meme that says ‘I wish I was as fat as I was when I thought I was fat’? That’s me.

But now…when I do look in the mirror and see fine lines etc I make myself remember that I loved my grandmothers’ soft faces. When I look at my hands, I see all the words they’ve written, the stitches they’ve sewn, the meals they’ve cooked. I look at my rounded stomach which (short of major surgery) will never be what it was and remember the children it carried under my heart.

And this is the thing. Most of us look in mirrors and despair because we are always looking for something that’s not there and was never there. We are looking for the perfect person we think we ought to be. Virtually none of us put as high an expectation on anyone else.

Last weekend I was bride’s helper at a wonderful wedding in the Highlands of Scotland. I have known the bride since university. The other bride’s helpers were her sister, her oldest childhood friend and a mutual university friend. I hadn’t seen the sister or the childhood friend for well over twenty years. They looked almost exactly as I remembered them. Not because they still looked twenty-ish but because they looked themselves. I wasn’t searching for the signs of age, I was scanning their faces for someone I’d once known. Talking to them, I found that like me, they were the same and yet different. We are grown up.

So I’m not going to start looking in mirrors more. I know that sometimes I’ll look tired or sad or bad-tempered but I can rise above it; sometimes (more often than not probably) my hair and make-up won’t be quite right but who will remember except me?

I’m an older woman who’s had two children. I will never look nineteen again. Why do I want to look nineteen? I don’t want to be nineteen.

I am happy to risk pen on my face if I can mostly maintain a mental image of myself as ‘looking OK’.

And as for vampires, well perhaps they’re missing out. Or maybe not. I’m still a little jealous.

looking good

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Paula Harmon

Writer

Mirror Selves

Looking Good?