Mirror! Mirror! On the wall!

I had an endless fascination for mirrors in my teens. I knew I had a heartbreaking handsome face but, of course, it helps if you can see it for yourself and confirm its existence. (Why are you grimacing like that and what do you mean by twirling your finger near your forehead? I do not get that at all.) The problem, though, was that I never could find the right mirror. (Manufacturing quality, these days! Uff!) Instead of reflecting the chiseled good looks of my real face, I could only see this doughy pudding, that masqueraded as a face, on mirrors. No wonder I used to keep checking in each mirror that I came across, merely to see if I had, at last, found one mirror that was of good quality. Needless to say, I failed since this country seems to have lost the art of maintaining manufacturing quality in anything.

This thing of looking for a decent reflection of myself was a long-abandoned idea...or so I thought. Then I found that I was doing it all along. The only thing that had changed was what I used instead of mirrors. What had also changed was what reflection I was looking for. But for that, I was still peering into 'mirrors' with the hope that I would see what I wanted to see and, need I say, still finding the doughy pudding instead of that chiseled Greek hero.

Through college, I was looking eagerly into the words of my professors to see a reflection of what I thought would be my ability. All I could find in the mirror was more a misty reflection, filtered through what, for want of a better word, can only be called my handwriting. This was a great help, of course. I could always assume that it would have been an Einstein that looked out of the mirror but for the fact that the handwriting obscured the fact like a coat of dust. I pity those with great hand-writings, now, since they had no such handy excuse for bad grades. In those days, though, I was burning with envy at the thought of my scintillating brightness put to the shade by lesser gems, merely because of this coat of dust.

Working life, ensued, and, unfortunately for me, I lost my handy excuse...since most of my work was typewritten. (The typist, though, found my handwriting a very handy excuse indeed!) I discovered, though, that, for my ability to be reflected back to me, those typewritten pages were the least important thing. People find it too difficult to analyse work - especially when it is not of the kind where you can say 'OK! The leak has stopped. Good Job" - and, therefore, prefer to judge its worth by the person doing it. To be THAT sort of person involved, from what I understood, being the sort who could reflect exactly the sort of image that the other person wanted to see of himself. I made the shocking discovery that not only was I the sort, whom mirrors refused to reflect properly, but I was also inept at adjusting MY reflecting surfaces so that I could reflect back the proper images. In other words, I was too prone to let honesty - and, quite often, tactless honesty - get in the way of telling people what they wanted to hear and, thus, reflecting back a flattering image of themselves. Ergo - what reflected back to me, from their words, was no good to bolster my self-esteem, either. In the whole damn process, the work itself seemed to have no relevance.

Through this journey of life, I seem to have kept looking into the mirror of other people's words every single day. I look to see if I am good at analysis - and get to know I am not attractive to people. I look to verify if my financial concepts are sound - and get to know that I am not a charmer. I check to see what people think of my mastery over spreadsheets - and get to know that I am not popular nor am I likely to ever be. (Fictional, any of my former colleagues reading this, if you are...purely fictional. You others - NO, the abilities are not fictional. Trust you to think of the worst.) In short, it is like always seeing your bottom reflected whether you look for your nose, your ears or your chin.

Eventually, I did give up on looking into mirrors. You know that fox with the grapes out of reach? He had the right idea. If, by chance, I do look at the mirror these days, I wonder why I was using the same ideas of judging myself like everyone else.

Doughy puddings ARE handsome. You can keep those ugly chiseled faces to yourself.