Not the Image

Did you mistake the image for the self?

The reflection in the mirror is not you, no matter how faithfully it echoes your face. It is a thin surface, fleeting, vulnerable to time. Like a puddle after rain, it ripples with the slightest wind, distorts with the smallest touch.

There are times when we hate our image. We obsess over it. We find fault, pick at it, angle and starve and preen at its imperfections.

When we’re lucky, we fall in love with the reflection. We polish it, protect it, measure our worth by its shine.

I have always identified with my body. As a girl I was slim, even skinny. But as adulthood came, my body softened, grew, changed. Enough so that I felt uncomfortable in my own skin.

I began dieting. Cabbage soup diets. Vegetable-only diets. Maple-syrup fasts. I pinched and measured, starved and restricted, always in the hope that the reflection would finally be good enough.

But the more I fixated on my image, the more I forgot myself.

I forgot the “me” beyond the mirror. The self that was not my weight, not my waistline, not my reflection. The self is beyond the image. The self flows through the image.

Your image is a shallow mirror. It can capture angles, shadows, the brief shape of you, but never your depth. To mistake it for the self is to stand over a puddle and call the reflection “me.”

The truth is what cannot be reflected: what flows through the image is you, not what sits on its surface.

Your essence is not fragile. The self is not erased by age or altered by opinion. It does not dim when others turn away.

You are the storm that washes the puddle away, not the reflection trembling in its surface.

Weight changes. Age will come. Faces will change. Roles do dissolve. The reflection weakens until it can no longer convince you that it was ever real.

And then, what remains? Are we the image? Or are we more than the image? Have we learned to embody something more real?

What remains is what always was: the essence. The self.

This is the truth: the image was never the radiant arc, the real thing. When the image falls away, you do not vanish. You remain.

Not as the mask, but as the one who wore it. Not as the reflection, but as the source.

The image is illusion, a temporary arrangement of light and form. The self is eternal.