Looking in the Mirror

I find it fascinating to know what people see when they look at me and how they view my personality. At best it is great to know people look at you positively, and at worst you at least become aware of how aspects of yourself can be viewed negatively and work on fixing these.

People seem to have vastly different opinions on me that really become quite confusing, I have been told both that I come across as arrogant and that I don't seem to have much confidence, that I am very talkative and that I am too quiet, that I come across as, quote "a bit of a dumb blonde" and that I use language that is too complicated and intimidates people. Perhaps these opinions reflect the vast extremes of my personality - whilst I have a lot of confidence in some areas, in others I completely lack it, and with this confidence comes my ability to talk the hind legs off a donkey, whilst when I feel insecure and that I have nothing valuable to say I will simply stay quiet. However people perceive me though, I am aware of my real personality and am able to brush off negative comments which I do not feel are accurate, or take on board criticism and try to act better in the future.

Comments about my looks however, have always been much harder for me to take. Perhaps this is because I am aware of how my own perception can be warped and therefore that I cannot really trust what I see when I look in the mirror. At 18, a size 8, and spending around 15 hour a week in the gym, I still remember refusing to go out one evening because everything I owned made me look fat. These days, I look back at the few photos I allowed to be taken of me at that time and wonder what had possessed me. Whilst those were very extreme times, an obsession with the way I look will always remain hidden under the surface; I feel an obsessive need to be perfect in everything I do and when this is focused on my body, diet and exercise get dangerously out of hand. I can therefore never rely on what I see to tell me how I really look.

Recently I have had two very nice compliments, one person telling me I was 'above average' looking, and another person telling me that someone who wasn't interested me needed their head examining. It struck me how hard I found it to have any faith or belief in either of these comments. Passing comments from my ex-mother-in-law-to-be that I should go on a diet, however, I could take weeks to get over, hating my reflection every time I caught it in passing.  Compliments however, leave me looking in the mirror wondering what on earth that person could be seeing in me that I simply cannot see. I suppose perception is individual to each person and the laws of attraction will mean that some people will see things that other people won't.

As I have got older, it has become easier to accept what I see in the mirror, even grow to see parts of my reflection that I vaguely like from certain angles, to try not to focus on the parts I want to change. However I doubt I will ever have an accurate view of myself because I cannot view myself from outside my own issues with my body and personality. I have come a long way to be comfortable with what I see in the mirror, perhaps then in reality it is better that I will never really know how I appear to anyone else.