If I ever find myself bored and in a semi-public place (though the busier, the better), I often—after squeezing every last drop of content from the social media apps on my phone—resort to playing a game. It’s simple: find a reflective surface like a window, a glass door, or (huzzah!) a mirror, and watch all the people who stare at their reflection as they pass by.
You’ll get an odd assortment. Truck drivers, businessmen, models. Maybe a few on some sort of substance that turns the reflection into a funhouse horror. Grandmothers, little babies and my personal favorite, mascots. They always, without a doubt, without regard to time or their surroundings, they always sneak a look.
I’ve continually wondered why we’re drawn to take that dreaded peek. I mean, if I’m wearing a bomb outfit, Lizzo is playing in my AirPods, and I’m feeling on top of the world, I’m gonna look, mainly thanks to the Truth Universally Acknowledged that “I don’t dress up for boys, I dress up to stare at my reflection as I walk by store windows.”
But as I sit and wonder about secrets that only the reflective surface can truly know, I always turn back to the idea of vanity. It seems like such a spiteful term thanks to the likes of Narcissus, and um, a certain man who lives in a white house? What I—we—often forget, is vanity’s humbling reminder.
It’s there when an Instagram influencer is posing with some form of weight loss tea. It’s there in the millisecond of a glance that the businessman gets as he runs to his next meeting in the reflection of his glass door. It’s there when the grandmother passes on her heirloom mirror to her granddaughter, and pauses for one last look:
“What is at stake in the invention of the self.”
I read this in Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot,” where it promptly stopped me cold. It is delivered to the reader as a conclusory statement from the protagonist’s professor, who is lecturing about genre scenes in art. It’s easy to just read over it, but it made me think: how many times have I applied lipstick just to remove it, mess up my makeup, and have to redo my entire face just because the lipstick color wasn’t aligned with who I wanted to be that day?
At some point, we won’t have to make ourselves up to portray ourselves in the way we want to be seen. We become it—that can be a happy story or it can be the opposite; sacrifice is a tricky concept and can be done in love or greed.
So a simple game becomes a lesson in vanity learned. Do these people see how they’ve changed? Or do they only see—in an approving glance, a reassurance, even—what they’ve managed, succeeded to become?
It’s most fun for me to watch people I know and love steal glimpses of themselves. Who do you see looking back? Look at how far you’ve come—gone.
