I’m writing this from my local coffee shop bar hybrid, the type of place that’s open all day and lets you bring your own food. The first time I came here a man fell in love with my reflection.
I had left to get a snack from the bodega. I was wearing my grandmother’s fur hat and my ex’s Salvation Army Dior coat. I was about to order a glass of orange wine. I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“I have never done this before…”
He had seen me first in the mirror behind the bar. He had become transfixed. Enamored. He was in love.
Something about Echo and Narcissus. Something about drowning…
It went on, as these things do. Eventually he became upset that I did not volunteer my phone number. Eventually the bartender asked him to leave me alone (then told him simply to leave). Eventually people started asking me if I was ok.
I did not give him my number. He left. I was fine.
A confession: I am strangely at home in these unwanted interactions, to the point that sometimes I think I want them.
Not in a conscious way, but in the way that as I was leaving my apartment earlier that afternoon I had a combination wish-premonition that someone would fall in love with me. In the way that I raised my voice to say, “you don’t love me! you don’t know me!” in response to his proclamations rather than the demure hush of appropriate shame. In the way that I’m writing about it now.
It is similar to the way I feel when women tweet about cat-calling and how I feel about that terrible Neil Labute monologue: oh no, poor me, poor beautiful girl translating to oh wow, look at me, I have worth. The weight of beauty’s burden appraised like the inside of a magician’s hat before being hoisted above the head for applause.
Something about Echo and Narcissus. Something about drowning…
A sizeable portion of my current day job involves taking mirror pics for instagram.
I put on clothes I can’t afford and take photos and videos showing off their textures and structure, patterns. I walk towards the mirror and pan up and down. I (for the most part) cover my face with the store’s oversized iphone. And then I remove some or all of these clothes and take photos showing off my body. Its textures and structure. Patterns.
In these, I do not cover my face. I look at the lens of my much smaller iphone in the mirror or the screen in my hand and smile slyly or show my tongue. I am more exposed physically and more identifiable; and while generally the photos posted to my job’s instagram have a wider reach, I make no effort to hide my nudes from exposure. I send them to multiple lovers and potential lovers in blue or green text chains and I post them online, generally, but not always, for a price.
Yes, dear reader, I have an onlyfans and also make custom digital pornography. I have no shame about that, only that it’s a shame it doesn’t pay all my bills. I think it’s more ethical than my retail job and I enjoy it more. I’m good at it.
Camera as mirror as market as test: I pass.
When I was in my final interview for the prestigious playwriting program I dropped out of last year, the program director made a mirror out of my writing by saying my writing was made out of mirrors.
She said my work was about being seen, about the act of being looked at and the space between looking and recognition. The seeking of eyes and appraisal. The need for it. She seemed perplexed by this desire. She wondered what it was about.
Something about Aristotle and Ovid. Something about recognition…
This woman and I didn’t really get along or understand each other. There was little recognition between us, but something in that comment struck a chord.
For a long time I said my work was about girlhood and grief, about trauma and sexuality and mothers and daughters. I said my work was highly physical and imagistic, theatrical, heightened. I said it was about the bodies in the space rather than what those bodies say. I said some stuff about sticking my fingers in people’s faces and something about ballet class and orange peels. I said a lot of things in a lot of poorly written artist statements, and while none of it is untrue (those things are threaded through my plays whether I like them or not), I think I missed something. Maybe I even missed the thing, the mark in the mirror, the test.
A confession: I lied before, or at least I told you something that is no longer true.
I’m not allowed to make instagram content for my job anymore. Haven’t been for weeks.
I joke that it’s because I’m too thin and young and hot, my styling too sexy, but I really have no idea why. All I was told was that my content was not cohesive with the brand’s other stories, but looking through the archive I can’t distinguish what sets my photos apart. I can’t point to the difference, can’t find the mark on my forehead, don’t recognize.
Maybe my obsession with my own reflection is the anesthetic and I haven’t woken up. Maybe I never will.
This really upset me, this silencing of my reflected image. It upsets me still.
I have spent so much of my life hating what I see in the mirror, and my current ability to like and use it has become attached to my identity to the point that if my image is not recognized (and recognized as good and hot and stylish and cute and fuckable and intelligent and appealing) then I do not recognize myself.
I’m Echo, forced to repeat and refract out of a desire to be loved, and also Narcissus, cursed to love an image of a self that will never love me back.
These days I find myself sneaking into the dressing room anyway, posing in leather pants while windex-ing the mirror, pulling up my skirt to reveal thigh high stockings (and the thigh above them) while my boss goes to the bathroom.
Something about Aristotle and Ovid. Something about recognition…
I realized recently that the protagonist of every play I’ve ever written says a variation of the sentence, “I’m so lonely.” There is no irony to these admissions, no subtext. It is generally the truest thing they say, a real moment of self-recognition. And it’s there in every play, from the 26 character lyrical epic to the taut two-hander. “I’m so lonely.”
It’s not something I’ve put in an artist statement, (“my work is about loneliness because I’m so fucking lonely,”) but that mark has been on my forehead since I started writing in 2019 and I only saw it in the last 6 months. Huh.
Is that what she meant, madame program director, lord dramaturg? That my loneliness seeps into my writing as a seeking of admiration and approval the way an incel-ified Ovid-ian Pygmalion says it seeps out of his pores in my play galatea 2.0? That my characters treat the audience how I treat the mirror or the camera, objectifying themselves to find their personhood? To transform?
I’m an only child who grew up in a dance studio full of mirrors and never felt lonely, not consciously. Is it because I was bonded, sibling-like, with my own image? Is that why the use of it is my first defense against loneliness?
When I was miserable and friendless in grade 8 I would come home from school to take photos of my outfits on a digital camera and post them to a largely unfollowed blogspot. Is taking off my clothes and framing myself up in my iphone for strangers and lovers alike simply an extension of that impulse? The impulse to make myself an object, to refract and multiply and transmit my image to others to distract from the loneliness in my self? To create enough aesthetic distance and enough selves so as to avoid recognition, to not see the painful thing right in front of me?
And… is that what I’m doing now?
I began an essay ostensibly about self-recognition and mirrors with a story about the refracted male gaze. I introduced myself as an object. I bragged about my perceived beauty. I lied.
If writing this is my mirror test, have I failed?
As I’m finishing this essay I see the man from the bar for the first time since my reflection undid him. I’m here like four times a week at least and haven’t seen him again til now. A proper bookend, appearing in the nick of time to give me some real creative non-fiction street cred, to give this thing an ending. A little Deus ex Machina. You can’t make this shit up.
We make eye contact but nothing more. No conversation or proclamations of love. No tap on the shoulder. He didn’t move towards me or speak, but he looked, noticed. My hair was down that first day, it’s plaited and pulled back now. Did he recognize?
I realize I don’t want him to come over here, have no desire for admiration as interruption. I’ve come here after a day of retail drudgery to recognize myself in writing, something I’ve been longing for since I woke up. Something in the unravelling of this, the excavation, has given me a sense of purpose. A sense of self.
I realize that in this moment I don’t need the mirror of his gaze to see myself. I’m not the girl in the bar mirror waiting to be admired, I’m centimeters away from my own reflection, close enough to see my pores.
I’m not saying one of these is better than the other (distance or closeness, neither gives the full picture), and for the sake of transparency, I just felt my eyes search for male approval as I walked back from the bathroom.
I take breaks to text lovers as I write this. The pull of their attention still draws me, but I muscle my way through. I create my own current. I do not drown.
I’m probably still missing the mark everyone else can see, but for tonight or this moment, I’m awake.
Something about Ovid and Aristotle. Something about transformation…
Another writer with a substack. Another hot girl with an onlyfans. Another lonely only child looking for love and getting smacked in the face with her own reflection.
I don’t know if every essay on here will be like this, don’t know if I’ll always take the mirror test so literally. I don’t know if the image I reflect will always be so revealing, but knowing myself the small amount that I do, it probably will be. I’m a girl who takes off her clothes for the internet and puts her secrets in her plays, sometimes without knowing it: who knows what’ll end up here.
There will definitely be more essays and ramblings. Works in progress. Peaks into my notes app (juicy as hell). Going to move my reading list and recommendations over here (potentially an interactive comment thread for paid subscribers?). Maybe subscribers will get my OF at a discounted rate for fetishizing my words as well as my body... Idk yet, but definitely stay tuned.
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