Mirror, mirror on the wall

I’ve often been told that my beauty is blinding. Sure, only my mom has told me that. She swears that whenever she looks at me, she can see gilded sparks. Sparks from my beauty, that is.

Unfortunately I wouldn’t know, because I tend to avoid mirrors. So when I accepted the challenge of not looking in the mirror for a week, I thought it wouldn’t disrupt my routine. But my task, I soon learned, was more difficult than it appeared. I was to stay clear not only of mirrors, but also of windows and  other reflective surfaces.

The first sign of trouble came early on. Forgetting my commitment to the challenge, I opened Snapchat, only to find my front-facing camera on and my reflection glaring back at me. In less than a minute, I had already managed to fail. At that moment, I knew the challenge would be harder than I anticipated.

As the week went by, it didn’t take me long to notice that like many of my peers, I was obsessed with my appearance than I thought. Throughout the week, I lost count of how many times my friends wanted to see how they looked in the mirror.

For one, my trips to the girls bathroom were quite the excursions. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of visiting the girls bathroom before, let me take you on a little journey. Lined up in the bathroom are about 20 girls, but only seven of those girls are there to actually use the bathroom. The other 13 huddle around the mirrors like students around the tables at PMT fundraisers.

Not being able to look in mirrors made my peers’ apparent obsession with their looks so much more obvious.

But I had better things to worry about: Mirrors were becoming increasingly hard to avoid. On the third day of my challenge, my parents decided to have a little family outing. Although my parents were fully aware of my challenge, they decided to go mirror shopping as a family. To my parents, “as a family” means “mandatory” and “put-on-a-smile-I-don’t-care-if-you-mean-it.”

Every two minutes, one of my parents would ask me to evaluate a different mirror, and I would repeatedly respond that I couldn’t look at it. To make matters worse, mirrors were scattered throughout the store. From closing my eyes to shutting myself in the corner of a store like a toddler taking a timeout, I did  everything I could to continue the challenge, blissfully unaware of the staring strangers whom my mom claimed were appalled at my behavior.

Although this dare brought on mounds of embarrassment, I discovered that it’s important to not be caught up with appearances all of the time. In the end, I learned that even though I don’t look like a sewer rat at school, I don’t need to obsess over my looks either. The person in the mirror — or not in the mirror — is OK.

Still,  aside from my Snapchat slip-up, I was able to complete all seven days of the challenge successfully. The laughs and memories I gained from this experience were priceless. As priceless as my beauty, that is.