This is a sample essay from the collection Right Body, Wrong Junk, by Avery Edison. It can be purchased here in digital format for $5 USD.
The Man (And Woman) In The Mirror
First published on the 27th of August, 2012.
Even the most rational of people feel a sense of unease when it comes to broken mirrors. And, as someone who recently bought a new unicycle because "my other two unicycles aren't great for my commute," I'm clearly not the most rational of people. So when I dropped my bathroom cabinet while moving into my new apartment, smashing the glass on its door, I worried that it was an omen, an ill start to my home.
Actually, the ill omens started when I flooded the apartment with excrement. Before I moved in, my now-girlfriend was living there by herself, and her toilet had stopped flushing properly. I'd spent just one night there, but when she popped out to the local coffee shop for five minutes, I had a go at trying to fix the bathroom issue. When my new lover returned, she found me astride the bowl with my hands in the tank, desperately trying to stop the flow as water flooded in from the entire building's plumbing system and cascaded over the tiled floor and into the hallway.
I'm still not sure how I messed it up so quickly, or why she forgave me. I'd like to note that I did fix the toilet, and after we cleaned up all the filthy water, it was a net good that I'd intervened.
But we should have just called a plumber.
I still had plenty of stuff to bring in from the van, so I propped the cabinet up on the sink, with shards of glass still stuck in the frame. I continued shuttling my possessions up eight flights of stairs, ignored the idea of just living in the street rather than continuing to punish my quads, and attempted to forget about the broken mirror.
Putting mirrors out of my mind has been tricky for the past few years. I'm not a vain person, but I am a transgender woman. I learned early on that there is a danger that can come with not looking your best.
I detailed in a later essay just what happens when one doesn't "look your best" as a transgender woman, so this is what's called a "tease". Or, I suppose, it's a line so vague as to be frustrating.
I suppose that the lack of specificity in this section was supposed to leave the consequences of poor personal grooming to the reader's imagination, which is likely to assume to the worst and create more sympathy for me than is warranted. This was the first piece I wrote, remember, and I wanted to ingratiate myself to my new audience. Was this an underhanded, dishonest technique? Sure. But maybe my current honesty is redeeming it
It's only in the past few months that I've been able to leave the house without a half-dozen once-overs in the hallway mirror, or the webcam on my laptop, or the shiny surface of my neighbor's silver SUV.
Tip: dark car windows can be very forgiving; brightly colored car finishes can straight up hurt your feelings.
I like to check my make-up and my hair, ensure my clothes look feminine enough (whatever that means), and even tense the muscles above my ears so that the shape of my face changes ever so slightly.
I've recently figured out that the shape of my skull around my eye sockets is not symmetrical, leading to the height differential between my eyebrows that has bugged me for years. I'm even more vigilant about doing the facial tensing now, despite the fact that it often gives me a headache. The fight against vanity is a constant one, and sometimes it is weird.
These behaviors are paranoid, yes, but they're also the behaviors of somebody who has been attacked in the street (not as bad as it sounds-the "assailant" was a twelve year-old drunk on cider who was disturbed by the incongruity of my voice and my gender presentation).
Again with the tease. At least I'm walking back the horrible imagery you, the reader, probably supplied yourself with. But am I just downplaying the event to make myself seem braver?
They are the safeguards of a girl who still has trouble inspecting her face and seeing anything but a boy, albeit a boy who used to get teased for looking like a girl. It's complicated.
As happy and comfortable as I am as a woman (and believe me, I feel better now, five years after coming out, than I ever did as a man), there's still the issue of re-training my brain, making it acknowledge that what it sees in every reflective surface is accepted by the world as just another female member of the species. I was nineteen when I transitioned, and I'm only twenty-four now, so for the majority of my life I was referred to by my male name. My instinct is still to respond to it if I hear someone call it out. Similarly, nineteen years of people looking at me and treating me as a dude means I have a tendency to sub-consciously treat myself that way too.
Two years on, I've stopped instinctively responding to that old name (which was Kyle, if you're curious). I'm very glad to leave it behind, and I love my new name, the one I chose for myself.
But when I returned to that broken mirror, that smashed and dented cabinet, I saw something new. Each small section of glass reflected a different fraction of my face, and each of those slivers looked utterly feminine. I saw myself in a way I hadn't before, the pieces of the whole more true to me than my complete face ever was.
I remembered reading about a woman with prosopagnosia (face blindness, for those of you not addicted to Wikipedia) who couldn't recognize her own appearance. She had echoes of Capgras Delusion, at times convinced that the person in the mirror was an impostor, that she had been replaced. She suffered from this disorder for years, until her doctor noticed that she could apply lipstick with no problems, and surmised that smaller mirrors presented her with no difficulties. He assembled close to a hundred mirrors in escalating sizes, so the patient could work her way up from the tiny recognizance of her mouth to an acceptance of her full-length image.
When I sent this essay in for editing, my editor asked if I could provide a link to an article or encyclopedia entry about this woman. I could not find one then, but now, with some more creative Googling, I found the entire case detailed in the book Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self. Google Books has the relevant pages, for those who are interested.
I experienced a similar effect. I observed the individual aspects of my face and acknowledged their womanliness without the years of associations that my complete visage carried. After I'd finished inspecting my eyes and lips and eyebrows individually, I could look in an unbroken mirror and see how they came together to make a woman's face. For a few moments, I could see the girl everybody else did.
It wouldn't be smart to keep a broken mirror in the house, as tempting as it is to end this story with my accepting the smashed cabinet as part of my life. It's a bathroom item, after all, and that's a room in which you're guaranteed to spend most of your time barefoot. I threw it out, and now I have nowhere to store spare tubes of toothpaste.
I did keep a small shard, though. I sanded down the edges, stored it in a pocket in my purse. When I'm feeling self-conscious I can take it out and study my features. I can look. And I can see.
I've no need for this shard anymore. Again, time has been my friend, and most days I can look in the mirror and see a woman looking back at me. Even without make-up on, and even when I haven't shaved in a few days and small hairs are starting to poke their way out my chin. I don't think I look beautiful, but I do think I look like myself.
This is a sample essay from the collection Right Body, Wrong Junk, by Avery Edison. It can be purchased here in digital format for $5 USD.