Mirrors

For a long time, I wondered where I belonged. I wanted to know there was a place for someone like me in the world.

When we’re growing up, I think we’re constantly looking for mirrors. We look for them in our families, our friendships, at school, in the things we watch, the music we listen to, the stories we’re told about what a life is supposed to look like. We probably don’t realise we’re doing it at the time. We’re just quietly collecting information about the world and looking for some evidence of ourselves within it.

Is there room for someone like me here?

I don’t remember exactly when I started understanding that my life might be harder and lonelier than other people’s. I just remember somehow knowing it long before I had the language to explain why. Looking back, it feels a little like being handed grief before I even understood what grief was.

There were paths I watched other people move towards that seemed natural for them and painfully complicated, if not completely inaccessible, to me. As I got older, people around me started having first crushes and awkward first kisses. They were figuring out who they liked, finding their groups, experimenting with who they were and beginning, however imperfectly, to imagine themselves as adults.

I struggled to imagine myself there at all.

I couldn’t picture how someone like me was supposed to move through the world. Things that seemed ordinary in other people’s futures — falling in love, being wanted, building a life with somebody — carried questions I didn’t know how to answer. While other people seemed to be discovering themselves, so much of my energy was going towards figuring out how to survive myself in silence.

And it wasn’t only one thing. I struggled to make friends. I struggled to understand where I fit. There were parts of myself I didn’t know how to explain to other people because I barely had words for them myself. Each experience created its own small sense of disconnection, and on its own, perhaps none of them would have explained why I felt so different.

But they stacked.

Eventually the question stopped being Do I belong here?

It became something much bigger.

Do I belong anywhere?

There was a period of my life when that loneliness became so deep that I didn’t feel connected enough to stay here. I was angry too. Angry that belonging appeared to happen almost incidentally for some people, while I seemed to be spending my life searching for evidence that there was somewhere I could exist without having to become somebody else first.

For years, I think I kept searching for one perfect mirror. Someone whose life looked enough like mine that I could finally look at them and think, There. That’s me. That’s where I go.

I did occasionally find people whose stories reflected parts of mine, and those moments mattered enormously. Sometimes it was simply hearing somebody speak openly about something I had carried silently and realising that another person had stood somewhere near where I was standing. I remember sitting in therapy groups and listening to people whose lives could be completely different from mine describe their own struggles, and unexpectedly recognising something of myself in them. The circumstances weren’t always the same. Sometimes they weren’t even close. But I knew the feeling underneath them.

Over time, I started finding mirrors in places I hadn’t thought to look.

Writing became one of them. I’ve always had a tendency to go beneath the surface of things — and then, if I’m honest, beneath the carpet underneath that. For a long time, that depth could make me feel strange, like I was from another planet, speaking a language nobody else could understand or even recognise. I struggled to connect with people through small talk, or to view the world through glasses that seemed clear to everyone else but blurry to me. My inner world was so vast I could live there, but why couldn’t I live as easily out here?

Then I would read somebody else’s work and realise they had gone there too. Someone else had followed a thought all the way down instead of turning away from it. I didn’t need their life to resemble mine to recognise myself in the way they looked at it.

Music did something similar.

There are songs I’ve returned to over the years because they helped me make sense of things I couldn’t yet explain for myself. Comfortably Numb has been one of those songs for me. What I found in it wasn’t somebody telling my story. It was something I recognised about my relationship with pain. I had spent so much of my life wanting to escape what hurt that sometimes, feeling numb to life seemed preferable. But there was another truth sitting alongside that: removing pain wasn’t necessarily the same as being alive. I would rather be touched by life, even hurt by some of it, than become so removed from it that I couldn’t feel myself in it anymore.

Maybe that’s what I had misunderstood about mirrors.

I thought I was searching for people who could reflect all of me back to myself. But increasingly, I found little pieces everywhere.

A person in a therapy room. A writer willing to go somewhere I thought I went alone. A song. A conversation with somebody whose life looked nothing like mine. Someone having the courage to speak about something I had never heard spoken aloud.

None of those reflections held all of me. They still don’t.

But each one held something.

And there is something beautiful about that realisation. A life doesn't have to look like mine for me to recognise something of myself within it.

But I don’t think I want to turn that into a neat lesson about how the mirrors were actually there all along.

Some of them weren’t.

There were things I needed to see growing up that I simply couldn’t find. There were possibilities I needed somebody to show me existed. One of the scariest things was not being able to see a future. And there is grief in wondering who I might have been if I hadn’t spent so much of my early life searching for evidence that someone like me could have a place here.

Finding fragments of myself later doesn’t make that absence meaningless.

Maybe both things are true.

Maybe we need mirrors. Maybe being able to see somebody living a life that makes our own feel possible matters more than we sometimes understand. And maybe, as we get older, we also learn that no single mirror is ever going to hold an entire human being.

I still find pieces of myself in strange places. In people who are nothing like me. In sentences. In music. In conversations I wasn’t expecting. Sometimes I recognise something immediately. Sometimes it takes years before I understand why something stayed with me.

I don’t know if I’ve stopped searching for the mirror I so desperately wanted to see as a child. But I think about mirrors differently now. As adults, we can learn that the world is bigger than what we’ve been shown. We can go looking. We can discover possibilities we didn't know existed. 

I’m not sure children can do that in quite the same way.

When you’re young, the world in front of you is the world. You don’t yet know how many people you haven’t met, how many lives you’ve never seen, or how many ways there might be to become a person. The mirrors around you help teach you what’s possible.

And when you can’t find yourself in any of them, you begin to wonder where someone like you goes.

I know now that no single mirror could ever have shown me all of myself.

I’m grateful for what I've found.

But I don’t think that means the mirrors I couldn’t find as a kid didn’t matter.

Some days I still feel like that kid, searching for a mirror, waiting to see a reflection of myself. The difference is that I’ve learned not to look at the broken glass on the floor as evidence that I don’t belong here. I’ve learned to pick up the fragments and recognise pieces of myself in them.

But kiddo, I still wish you could have found a few more mirrors.