Can avoiding mirrors make you a happier, more fulfilled person? That’s the idea behind Bay Area blogger Kjerstin Gruys’ decision to swear them off for one year and chronicle the experience on her blog, Mirror Mirror OFF The Wall.
Gruys is a PhD student in sociology at UCLA and is getting married in October. She knew something had to change when she saw early stages of bridezilladom getting the best of her while she was shopping for a wedding gown. Rather than feeling excited by the process, the bride-to-be found herself in a downward spiral of self-scrutiny and vanity, obsessively picking apart her flaws and imperfections in the mirror on a weekly basis, wishing she looked slimmer and prettier in the gown of her dreams. “In those moments I felt like the worst version of myself,” she writes. So she gave herself two weeks to map out the logistics of her new mirror-free lifestyle and then said goodbye to her reflection. Five months into it, and weeks away from her wedding, she’s still going strong.
Although her mission to live from the “inside-out rather than the outside-in” resonates widely with some readers, for others her methods miss the mark because they focus on the symptoms rather than the underlying factors that rattled her self-esteem and triggered her bridezilla in the first place. “Wouldn’t it be better to work on accepting how you look rather than avoiding it[?]” one commenter asked. Along those lines, mainstream media and advertising emerge as much more menacing culprits than mirrors in affecting how we feel about ourselves and our reflections. Also, her decision to continue to wear makeup on most days because it helps her feel pretty has prompted some readers to criticize the very premise of the experiment and to suggest that it’s not quite feminist enough.
But Gruys isn’t trying to be the next Gloria Steinem. She’s using the experience to get to a healthier place with her self-image. She may not be tackling all of the deep-seated issues women face with body image, nor is she suggesting that going mirrorless is a cure-all, but at least she’s doing something proactive to change how she feels in her own skin.
What do you think? Could you go without a mirror for a year? Would it boost your self-esteem, or would it just make you crazy?
Photo source: http://www.ayearwithoutmirrors.com/
