My Reflection & Me
face.
Some people say that your appearance does not define you, and I would like to agree with that sentiment. However, this world has continuously taught me that the two are so intertwined with one another that sometimes, it has become impossible for me to separate the two. My face has become who I am, and that in itself has led to more problems in my selfhood than I can count.
When people meet you for the first time, they typically notice your face. Humans are naturally drawn to facial features, sometimes to the point that we’re able to see them in places where they don’t actually exist. Do you know the uncomfortable feeling you get when you look at a manipulated image of a human face in a horror film, where the shape of the eyes is unnatural, and the mouth is way too big? That’s the biological instinct that has been programmed into us, so that we’d be able to detect humans from non-humans – or humans that have had something done to them enough to make them look dangerous. Flight and fight response, you know?
That uncomfortable feeling you feel in your gut when faced with human-like features that look eery is called the Uncanny Valley. At some point, when a human-like creature begins to lose some of its human characteristics, either by becoming dead – like a dead corpse – or by becoming an item instead of a living thing – like china dolls – we start to feel that uncanny, eery sensation. The deeper you go into the Uncanny Valley, the more uncomfortable you get, and the more you want to escape from the thing that’s in front of you.
But what does it mean when people who meet you for the first time, when they see your face, they say, “There’s something wrong with your face”? Or when this keeps on happening to you, year after year, people look at you and pictures of you and they grimace, and they say, “Your face is just not right” – what does it mean to you, to your sense of self?
mirror.
We treat people differently based on factors that are completely out of their control, and we all know this. We can try to make the conscious decision not to do it, which is the right thing to do, generally speaking. But it would be naive and idealistic of me to say that looks don’t matter, that your aesthetics don’t matter in the context of who you are as a person. It shouldn’t matter as much as it does, but it’s an undeniable fact. To me, personally looks and aesthetics genuinely do not matter: I don’t care about what you look like, I care about who you are as a person. But that alone, my subjective opinion on this matter, is not enough to negate the reality I live in. And that, I have become very, far too familiar with in my life.
A great deal of the abuse I faced at the hands of my peers was based on my appearance. It’s taken me over ten years to even be able to talk – or write – about this without bawling my eyes out. It used to be such a sore subject for me that I told all of loved ones to never say anything about the way I looked. I just could not handle it, I’d heard and gone through enough of it already. And all of this has eventually caused me to develop a detachment between my selfhood and my body, my outer self. I do not know what my face looks like. I look at my reflection, and I just don’t know.
Sometimes I think about if they had known about the term of the Uncanny Valley, maybe that’s where they’d put me in, at the bottom of the valley. Who knows.
In a world that is so heavily focused on aesthetics (and is becoming even more so very rapidly), it is almost impossible not to have at least a part of your identity based on your appearance. That is the way other people interact with you in this world, they see you and the way you look when they talk with you. And since a lot of identity is also based on social factors like communities, the way people choose to treat you based on your appearance will have some kind of an impact in your identity, too.
So even though I really don’t know what I actually look like, what my reflection is like in reality, it has become almost synonymous with who I am as a person. And that is just a bunch of terrible, disgusting, and dehumanizing words that I don’t want to repeat here for you. I’d imagine reading them wouldn’t be too pleasurable, anyways.
Getting back in touch,
ichigonya
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