What if there were no mirrors

I have seen pictures of myself in that environment. That girl looks nothing like the reflection in our bathroom mirror. When I am taking care of my young daycare family, I hear and see myself in their words and actions. One does not need a mirror or tape recorder to see what my young charges see and hear. When my little two-year-old started complaining about her sore back and shoulder, after realizing she hadn't hurt herself, I stopped and listened.

I heard myself. What if there were no mirrors in our world? What if all we knew of our reflection is what life reflected back to us — smiles, sour looks, joy, sorrow, elation, devastation. Would we change our look based on trying to change the expression on those who reflected what was going on inside of us? What if all we knew of our look is what we saw in a shadow, an aluminum surface or a pool of water?

Somewhat distorted, we may look better or worse, fatter or thinner, taller or shorter. My hair may still be an issue because my shadow has shown me things I never knew about my hair. What if the reflection we see in our mirror is not at all what the world sees?

We may see wrinkles, grey roots and bad hair. The Mirrorless name mine are a group of individuals who have only one mirror in their home—usually the small one above their bathroom sink.

Whether by choice or by accident, their choice represents something rare and interesting to me: the refusal to revel in their own image. The first challenge of living without mirrors was figuring out how to cover mine. We covered these with two white fitted sheets, which did not open up the space.

Our two other mirrors were also put to bed: with a blanket and pillowcase respectively. And then our home was officially asleep: no way to escape into our own dumb eyes.

The evening that followed was disorienting, as all glances at myself while undressing for the shower, while changing into PJs, while performing my skincare routine proved fruitless. I was nowhere to be found. When I reached out to The Mirrorless population via Instagram , many acknowledged feeling free from these small but persistent opportunities for self-assessment:.

After night one, I saw how this could be true. The next day, not having a mirror proved potentially punitive. Was there breakfast in my teeth? How could this be the case? Has my mirror become a cheat code, keeping me from gleaning an intimate and tactile understanding of my wardrobe? My first blind outfit entailed jean shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks. But it did come at the potential cost of misjudgement, which begged the question: Which was worse—facing self-criticism at home or later, accidentally, in a shop window?

Our crisp, shiny mirrors, which allow us to peer deeply into faults that we hardly ever notice in others, complicate more than they clarify. In the modern imagination, the mirror has been placed at the center of what defines us as a species, and what defines us as individuals. While many other species can make tools or communicate in some form of language, only a select few—great apes, dolphins, orcas, elephants, and the Eurasian magpie—have demonstrated the self-awareness to recognize their own reflection in a mirror.

But before there was any such thing as a mirror, human beings were still self-aware, possessed of an individualized sense of self; the only real difference, perhaps, was the degree to which we relied on others to view us. Because we could not witness ourselves, except with difficulty in pools of water, we needed others to see us, to make us visible.

It seems hard, but not impossible, to imagine ourselves back into that earlier, more unencumbered state: knowing our bodies by how it feels to dwell in them, instead of by how they shift incrementally over the course of a day, or a lifetime.