Field Note#005 - Broken Mirror

There is a strange responsibility that comes with getting to know someone deeply. The more you learn about them, the more carefully you learn to speak. You uncover what their wounds are, closed as well as healing, and become mindful not to touch them.

I’ve never been someone for surface-level relationships. I crave understanding, both to give it and to receive it, but sometimes that comes at a cost. Sometimes understanding isn’t returned, but I’ve always seemed to be okay with that. To have a lifetime of being misunderstood, it is such a beautiful feeling to be able to make someone feel seen. To hold up a mirror and say “I see all parts of you, and I still love you for who you are,” but sometimes, this understanding becomes a weight you aren’t meant to carry.

For most of my life, I felt I was a mirror. Helping to close the distance between who people thought themselves to be and who they really were. Reminding them that the pain they’ve endured doesn’t make them any less worthy. I tried to help reshape their ideas of themselves, to be able to see themselves through the eyes of someone else so that they could fall in love with themselves again (or sometimes, for the first time). It is the most wonderful thing to me to see someone discover they aren’t who they thought they were. Other times, it can be a painful experience if the reflection is one they aren’t ready to see.

—

There are relationships where you can try endlessly to be understood. Repeated forgiveness over and over until there is nothing left to give. Taking the emotional beating because you feel the power of the pain behind it, knowing you were not the root of it.

But what happens when the gilded frame of a mirror finally breaks? The reflection doesn’t change. It just becomes more difficult to hold.

The sharp edges of the reflection start to dig. The places you've spent years carefully dancing around now seem like the only places for your feet to land. And just like that, the mirror breaks, and the time spent protecting them from the jagged edges is forgotten in a single moment of honesty.

Why do people so easily forget the years you spent protecting their feelings, and remember only the moment you finally stopped? Once you’ve reached the threshold of what you can carry, suddenly your pain is secondary to theirs.

—

I used to think part of love was found in the things we don’t say, but I’m coming to learn that isn’t quite it. What if love isn’t protecting people from themselves, but telling the truth before resentment finds its way in? I choose now to stop pretending that the frame is unbreakable. Pain wants to be acknowledged and will press against the glass until something finally breaks. I’ve learned that ignoring pain only makes it find other ways to reflect itself until it is seen.

I never thought understanding could become a weapon, but sometimes when you avoid the truth, a wound is the only way it feels it can make itself known. Maybe I was never trying to protect people from themselves, but instead trying to protect myself from becoming another villain in their stories, which in the end seems to still be the way it’s written. And in those stories, that is how it happened.

Every person has a threshold where the mirror loses its protective frame, and I think I’m finally understanding that I prefer to live without it.