I was brushing my teeth this morning in my bathroom mirror and i realized how unafraid i was of my own reflection. I am and have always been a compulsive skin picker; i popped a pimple in a public bathroom this afternoon. But I am becoming a new person more in control of myself every day. I am an adult. Under the weight of graduate school, more crushing than I ever anticipated, I have felt a constant state of partial submersion and suffication. It seems that everyone I see is better equipped for this life than me. Students in my cohort give beautiful, insightful presentations on complex topics theyre steeped in knowledge of. they see and read the obscured figures in an illuminated Quran, they curate exhibitions with renowned international artists, they tell me things I can hardly comprehend. It is difficult, in this environment, to think that i could keep up, to feel that I am growing at all. It feels more like i'm being compressed into a crumpled ball to be spit through a staw and stuck to whatever marketing firm I happen to fall on.
When i saw myself in the mirror this morning, I was in a desperate crawl to try to get to the library. I am behind on my finals, my head is a mess, and I desperately needed to get out of the house. A very typical morning. I brushed my teeth and sink washed my bangs and smoothed the collar of my blouse. Moving in my reflection, though, I realized how ordinarily human it felt. Without staring at myself for so long that my body was shattered and fragmented, that my bones and flesh and skin and fat moved out of place, that I metamorphosized into a human-insect hybrid, unsalvagable by even the most extreme measures, I walked away. I packed my backpack, i put on my coat, i went to the library. Throughout undergrad, I had a crushing compulsion to allow my reflection to haunt ans possess me. I kept the standard-issue mirrors in my dorm room covered with scarves and sheets, protecting me from being hypnotized and losing myself in