How much of who you are can be found in the mirror?

We all see different thing when we look in the mirror. I normally see someone who is very unattractive and very pretty big. Tonight I see someone who is fairly attractive but still pretty big.

Ask your friends who you are. They’ll tell you things about you that you don’t know but only if you’re open to hearing what they have to say. Sometimes that part is tough.

You tell me. How much can you possibly know about me just by looking at me? I don’t think outward appearances define a person, do you?

I don’t think mirrors define who I am. I think I define who I am. I don’t discover myself, I create myself. I become the me I want to become.

Nothing at all really. I know that people have told me that they were afraid to approach me because I look “Mean, scary, and in one case, intense.”
Really? That’s not me at all.
I once scared a friends husband by opening my door when he came over. I had been asleep,or trying to sleep after working a night shift, and some guys were working with a jack hammer and there was a levitating dog who kept barking outside my third floor balcony. I finally got to sleep and he woke me up. This is a big, burly man, six and a half feet tall. He looked at me and said “Ah…..I’ll come back later.” and scurried off. When I told them the circumstances later, he told me all I needed to do was lean over the balcony and whisper “stop it”. He was convinced that they would have dropped their equipment and ran.
But I don’t feel scary or unapproachable on the inside.

@Trillian I am laughing so hard about the “levitating dog”!!! I know sometimes they jump and jump while they are barking. Your description gave me a giggle fit though.

I don’t see how what other people “think” should define me at all. Someone out there might “think” I am a republican, and it won’t change the fact I am a registered democrat. People might “think” I like rap music and I still hate it. People might think I am from Mars and that I am part of a hybrid alien genetic experiment. People think all kinds of things. What people think sometimes is close to reality and sometimes is far from it. Some people drown in their own predjudices. Sometimes people see a stereotype or label they slapped on you, or they only see what they want to see. Or, even more often, they project their own motives and feelings onto you.

I think my point is bein missed. We’re talking about mirrors, seers or writers or something. A mirror reflects the thing back exactly as it is. Except maybe reversed. You can’t see your face, right? You look in the mirror. Is the mirror defining your face? Of course not. It just reflects what is there.

So that’s a metaphor for other people reflecting you/your identity back to you. They do not define you. They just give you a way to see yourself.

What I’m asking is how much of you can be reflected back to you via mirror (human or otherwise), and how much is completely internal and can not be seen in any mirror of any kind.

@wundayatta I think I got it, didn’t I? People perceive me as mean or scary because apparently I have an intense gaze. That is a reflection of how I look, but that is not me on the inside.

Go beyond the mirror of others.

Look to the world as a mirror.

If you think that life is hard, a struggle, dog eat dog, thats exactly whats going to be reflected back to you via your perceptions. A world of unhappiness.

The opposite is true as well, if you see, expect, fair treatment, kindness, good things, you see the world as a happy and accomodating place and you project these things yourself, that is what you will receive.

Then there is the mirror of others….what you like/dislike about all others are the parts of yourself that you either embrace or reject.

Once you transcend beyond this duality you will see yourself, in everything, everyone.

When consciousness wakes up to itself you may then, for the first time, be able to see yourself and others clearly, not through the filters of your own distortions.

@Trillian Well, sort of. Still, I think it is useful to pay attention to other people’s perceptions of you. People tell me I can be intimidating. I have facial expressions that can put the fear of God into some people (with respect to tasting food). Ok. I didn’t know that. So I believe I have to think about what they see in me, and why I am giving off that energy.

You can say, @Trillian “Oh, that’s not how I am. I am completely different.” I think it would be useful to pay attention to what people say. They don’t define you, but they do mirror you. It could be important to reflect on why people find you scary. Why do people perceive you not as you perceive yourself?

Are you absolutely the final word in who you are? Do you really know yourself better than anyone else? Is it possible you could be hiding something from yourself? Is it possible that you are giving off a scary energy without even being aware of it? If that is the case, then are you scary or are you not?

My belief is that I do not know myself completely. In fact, I think there may be many things well hidden that are part of me, and inform my identity, but I have no awareness of. Other people serve as a mirror reflecting me back to myself. They do not tell me who I am, but they do tell me how I come across, and in that, they help me find out things about myself that I might not ever find out on my own.

I pay a lot of attention to human mirrors (not so much for physical mirrors). I have things I want to say, but I can’t say them if people can’t understand me. I have things I want to do, but I can’t do them if people think I’m doing something else entirely. I need their cooperation and I need their feedback.

We talk a lot about communication here. Relationships depend on lots of quality communication. But so many times, the communication is very flawed. That’s why tons of people ask the same questions here: what does this mean? What does that mean? They need a mirror. Or many mirrors since all the mirrors reflect from a slightly different point of view.

Our “mates” help us understand who we are because they provide the most detailed mirror. Except, if we can’t understand the reflection; if it makes no sense to us, then it has no useful content. They do not tell us who we are, but they do tell us how we appear, and I think we have to pay attention to that, because we may be something we did not want to be. We may not know ourselves. And that is a very tricky thing.

I doubt if there have been many people as introspective as I am. Maybe half a percent of the population thinks that much about who they are. Maybe less. Maybe one in a thousand or even one in a million. I hear that reflected back to me all the time. I think too much. I am too attached to outcomes. I depend on other people too much for my happiness.

I hear that, but it doesn’t really make sense to me, because I love to think. I love to observe and analyze. I have some very specific things I would like to do for the world. And one of those things is a specific kind of relationship that I hope to experience.

I will use words like “incomplete” or a “hole inside me” or “something missing.” People seize on these locutions and tell me that this is an unhealthy way of thinking. I should figure out how to complete myself.

It’s hard to know if I am communicating clearly, or not. I know the feeling I feel. I know what I imagine may help (although there is mounting evidence that it won’t help). One could call it all a delusion, but I don’t see what that adds to the conversation. One could say, as @Coloma just said, that we get to choose. We put out into the world what we get back. Or we get back what we put out. I am quite sympathetic to this point of view.

I look at myself from a naive point of view. I don’t know what I know, so I have to watch myself in order to find out what I know and who I am. I don’t trust my own thoughts. For one thing, I know my linguistic thoughts are just part of the story. There is a whole other part of me that is thinking up a storm, but I don’t have very direct access to those thoughts. I have to meditate or make music or run or do yoga or something in order to quiet my linguistic mind enough to begin to catch the drift of my non-linguistic mind. Even then, since the thoughts occur in a way that I don’t understand, I can’t derive a lot from them. I mostly get feelings.

I feel like something is missing. I could try to dominate that feeling with mental techniques. Or I could try to trick it with Buddhist kinds of ideas. I could try to reduce my attachment to these feelings. Then, perhaps I would be happy.

But I don’t do these things. I appear to be clinging, to some degree, to my unhappiness. I hold my despair and my depression close. I see this, and I wonder why. Why would I hold onto these horrible things? I don’t really know. All I can surmise is that there is a part of me that thinks these things are valuable. They have something important to teach me. That being happy or complete or whatever it is I think I’m looking for is not really necessary. There are more important things than getting rid of the pain. Or maybe that I can stand more pain than I think I can.

It may surprise people to know that I have no clue. All I can do is watch and see what happens. Sometimes, I have to take action, and when I don’t understand the significance or consequences of the actions, it’s hard to choose. The obvious outcomes are clear. But underneath them are other options and other outcomes that may put me in a very different place. Perhaps a place that feels much more comfortable and stable to me.

But to make such choices I have to go against my linguistic brain and the advice of everyone else. And I do that. Amazingly, I do that! And I don’t know why. All I can think is that there is a part of me that thinks it knows better what to do. So I follow this gut feeling. I wonder why I don’t stop myself. I think that perhaps I can’t stop myself. But maybe I don’t want to. Or maybe I am being guided by another part of myself that has a different idea of how to do things.

@wundayatta

Exactly! You have to some large degree an attachment, a sense of identity that has formed from your unhappiness.

Who would you be without your unhappiness?

Have you ever heard of or done any Byron Katie work?

She’ll take you apart at the seams and leave you with nothing to cling to. lol

www.thework.com

The world is my mirror… and that is informative.

Everything anyone needs to know about me is visible in the mirror. My eyes don’t lie, to you, to my doctor, to the mailman or to me. When I look at me in the mirror, I see all the me, the good, the bad, the ugly.

That is kind of a scary thought, to think that other people define me – I DON’T THINK SO! Other people usually want you to fail, make a point to try to magnify your faults and minimalize your accomplishments. Most people try to climb up by pushing others down. A person that would let others define who they are is in BIG trouble.

@Skaggfacemutt They don’t define us. They reflect us to a certain degree. Which is what the question is about. How much of yourself do you see reflected back to you from others?

This is about how you learn what others see in you, and how well that agrees with what you see in yourself. Other humans are imperfect mirrors, of course. But they do contain some truth. What truth do you see in the way people respond to you?

I stand by my answer. I don’t think others reflect us, either. The smartest, most successful people I know consistently get negative feedback from the people in their lives. Blame it on jealousy or others feeling threatened by them – I don’t know. But a strong, successful person does not let that negative feedback deter them. If they did, they would no longer be strong and successful.

I keep company with those that reflect my honesty and high standards of integrity.

The old ’ birds of a feather thing.’

We are all very different individuals but the common ‘reflection’ is one of integrity.

So is the real question here “does your choice of friends reflect who you are?” Because if so, that is a whole different question.

@Skaggfacemutt Not quite. It’s how good is the human mirror you find in the people you usually interact with. It’s fair to say there is not much of a mirror, especially if you are smart and successful and hanging out with folks who want to stab you in the back.

Then again, perhaps they are a better mirror than someone would be willing to admit. But this is about perception, and if someone perceived themselves as good and honest, and perceived others as back stabbers, then they would certainly say other people are not a good mirror.

Around friends, as you say, it could be very different. I hope it would be different. Surely we choose our friends because they reflect us in ways that we like. So there could be different reflections in different kinds of “mirrors.” The reflection you see at work might be very unlike the reflection you see in the people you play with.

“How good is the human mirror you find in the people you usually interact with?” Sorry, I don’t understand the question. Are you asking how accurately others reflect you? Their perception or my perception? Are you asking if the people I choose to interact with have qualities that reflect my own? I just read your original question again, and it sure sounds like you are saying that people look to the opinion of others to validate themselves. Maybe if you clarified your question, I could give you a better answer.