Who is that that looks back at us in the reflected glass? I was recently treading the mill at my gym and watching Dr. Phil as he assisted an obsessive compulsive woman redirect her thoughts away from a negative dialogue with herself. She said that at forty-something, as she looked in the mirror, she had decided it best not to smile in order to avoid laugh lines. Since when was enjoying life an option?!

 

I, too, have spent Hitchcockian moments in front of the mirror, wondering whatever it could be that I could do to change what I saw. I guess that’s why Hollywood wunderbabes are such a fantasy for both men and women – how would it feel to wake up and have something decadent gaze demurely back at you while you were brushing your teeth?

 

In my youth I fantasized about what I would look like if I could diminish the size of my nose. And as fate would have it, I recently saw a preview of Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf with an appendage that changed her into another human being. Interesting that, and then, maybe not. And yet again, maybe.

 

A few years ago I was having cocktails at a friend’s, and a mutual co-worker made a point of directing a story towards me about a friend of hers that, after having a nose job, lived happily ever after. I failed to make the connection. But then, after seeing Jennifer Grey from Dirty Dancing become an entirely different person after her nosectomy, I had to ask myself, where did the other Jennifer go?

 

Isn’t our exterior a mysterious thing? I see so many young people out to abuse it, so many middle-aged people out to preserve it, and then the ones in the middle who just want to change it. What is it about our skin that makes us think that others might see someone we are not? More questions!

 

We are human beings after all, and to a certain degree we do believe that what you see is what you get, and what you have is what you are. I remember being a shy and awkward adolescent, feeling that no one and nothing would be able to know who I really was because I was trapped in a body that made me feel alien and inadequate, and the world seemed to respond accordingly. Or was it so simple?

 

It takes a lot of guts to take on your true self – to look yourself in the mirror and smile back at what you see. In this regard I think I have come along way, but even now, as I edited myself, I saw that I had written:  “And as fate would have it, I was Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf with an appendage that changed her into another human being.”

 

Interesting that, and maybe not. And yet again, maybe.