I want you to imagine waking up in darkness. You feel yourself lifting your hand towards your face, you feel it touching your cheek, but see nothing. You are there, standing, the floor beneath you is solid. You feel unafraid.
In the distance you see a light gently illuminating a shape. It is unclear what it might be. Is it a door? A passage? You walk to inspect it. With each step the light becomes brighter, and slowly you see what you are walking towards. Surrounding you, arranged side by side in a semicircle, are seven mirrors as tall as the tallest man. Looking around into each of them you see yourself, until your gaze settles on the one in front of you. As your eyes focus on your reflection you notice that the image of you begins to slowly fade and you begin to notice the outline of someone else behind the mirror. The longer you focus on the mirror in front of you, the clearer the person behind the mirror becomes. You recognize her. It’s your mother. She smiles at you, she knows that you are recognizing her. She can see you too. She is smiling the way only your mother could smile at you. You feel it. But, she looks different, she isn’t the age she should be, she is the age she was when you were nine. In this moment this does not strike you as strange, it is how you dream of her, she is always that age in your dreams.
The longer you look you begin noticing that she isn’t alone, she is with you, the nine year old you, and you realize that maybe you are watching what feels like a memory. You know it happened to you, you remember how it felt, it’s so real, it’s right there. You could so easily pass through the mirror and join them, but you are transfixed.
The memory becomes hazy, a fog descends behind the mirror, and they are gone. Your gaze is drawn to the mirror next to it, another shape arrives, it is your father. But you want to go back to that memory, you keep looking at the center mirror, hoping to see your mother again. Your father isn’t coming into focus, but you can feel how he used to make you feel. Your eyes dart to the opposite mirror, hoping to see your mother again, wanting to feel that way again. You notice a new outline, someone new is behind the opposite mirror. It’s your best friend, looking the way they did when you first met, they look so young and happy. You try and tell them what’s happening, that you don’t know where you are, but they can’t hear you. All you hear is the echo of your own voice. With them as well you begin to see memories, the times at your favourite place to go, the secrets only you two have of your times together. You feel the way only they can make you feel.
Over the next couple of hours you look into each of the mirrors. Each containing a different person whom you have loved, the main characters in the story of your life. You see the memories, all of them, good and bad, the ones you forgot about, the ones you wish you could forget. The mirrors show you everything, exactly the way in which it was. The stories and memories that exist only between you and the loved ones in your life. Each mirror, dedicated to your relationship with them.
This is how I like to look at how it feels to begin becoming self-aware.
The way in which we know a child is becoming self-aware is by doing exactly this. We place them in front of a mirror and at around 18 months they begin to recognize themself as the image in the mirror. This is often the signal that the child is moving from being an infant to a toddler. It’s a major developmental phase in each of our lives.
This process of recognizing ourselves increases dramatically in complexity the older we get. We begin to not only recognize ourselves, but we begin to recognize the rules of what it means to be us. We discover our boundaries, our predilections, our nature. In understanding the rules of how we are and how to interact with different people in our lives we are simultaneously developing our personality and our understanding of the people around us. We begin to unconsciously measure how we should be and that it could be different depending on who we are around.
As adults these measures are fully articulated, baked into our social norms, and educated not only by the expected responses of the people around us to what we say or do, but the memories that form a part of these measures. Every unique relationship we have is very much like a strand of DNA, the double helix, an interplay of our memories with that person and the current state of the relationship. The history of each relationship is bound to the present of that relationship, it lives like a shadow inside every moment we share with that person, ghost notes dotting the melody of our bond as it is today.
Who we love changes us. They shape our rules of engagement and in this way influence how we are comfortable socially and what we deem acceptable. They set new rules for us to explore ourselves with, they inspire us and provide permission to be more of ourselves, or atleast, to roleplay and wear a new mask to see how we like it. Who we invite into our lives has a lasting impact on the way in which the world makes sense to us, politically, psychologically and emotionally. A friend or romance can set us free in a way that no drug ever could, to revel in their newness is like dancing wildly inside a part of your personality that you never knew existed. This dance can be to our delight or to our doom. Every meaningful friendship is a doorway as well as a mirror. The level of our self-awareness will determine the extent of the impact our relationships have on us.
We don’t look for people who are like us and to assume that we do is too simplistic. We drift towards people according to our social needs. Some of us make compromises between what we need personally and what we need socially or otherwise. Perhaps we are drawn towards someone that represents what our personality lacks, or they are happy to do what we are trying to avoid socially. Introverts are very often friends with extroverts, as an example. Culture, religion and similarities in physical features provide a veil to hide what motivates our social choices. It is easier to play into the roles we know others expect of us, who recognize these roles as plausible, than to seek someone different from us who also is visibly or culturally different from us. To do so would be to invite real comparison and our subconscious agenda might become apparent. We wouldn’t want to invite judgement when seeking someone who compliments us or matches our needs. If this was obvious, we would be forced to become more self-aware about what drives us towards this person. To engage with that gap, or not, is dependent on how desperately we do not want something to happen again. A divorcee who believes they had no part to play in the collapse of their marriage, who repeats the exact same pattern two more times before realizing they are marrying the exact same person and they need to face themselves before looking for a new partner again.
For many of us this happens sooner or later in all relationships. The excitement of the person wanes over time and our appreciation of them becomes more nuanced and balanced. We are faced with, to different degrees, who this person is to us and what about them draws us to them. In attempting to gain this insight we are introspecting, reflecting on our own personality, or more superficially our lifestyle, and how it is complimented by this person. We are discovering ourselves through the exploration of the idea of this person, and this can continue long into the relationship. We either gain from each other, when the gap that they fill in our personality or intelligence is attractive for us to step into and explore because of them, or we step away when the gap they fill overwhelms us emotionally or psychologically. Either way, we learn something and are not the same after, precisely because of this relationship.
