The girl in the mirror said more in her silence than anybody has ever said in words.
Sometimes I honestly don’t know what to say…. I don’t know what to say to you, to say to the world, to say to my friends, my family, to say to myself. Sometimes I’m just speechless. Sometimes I can’t say anything because I forget how to speak; sometimes I even forget how to breathe, how to sleep, how to eat. Sometimes I wake up and I can’t remember my own name. I realize all this is because I've been living so long in the shadows of the girl I once was compared to the girl I am now. That girl I was… she was great. She was the honor student, the responsible one, the one who treated her friends with kindness and respect, and stayed out late occasionally. But the girl I am now… she’s the extreme version of that. She laughs louder than anyone in the room, she smiles more genuinely than the happiest person in the room, she loves to spend time with her friends and she treats them like her equals, her family, her soul. But she stopped caring about school and she stopped caring about her feelings, and she stopped caring about how she was being treated, all simply because the moments she shared with the people she cared about were just those tiny bursts of happiness that she can’t muster up when she’s no longer with them, when she’s no longer busy, because she has to face the girl in the mirror everyday who looks at her with judgement in her eyes, disdain on her face, and woe in her soul for the person she’s become because she let the world tell her who she was supposed to be, how she was supposed to smile and breathe and pretend everything is okay. The world told her how to live and she depended on that, because she had never trusted herself to do the right thing, to do what she needed to do.That girl in the mirror stares back at the new girl and shakes her head, points her finger and says “Girl, you need to look at yourself. You barely sleep, you barely eat, you think you’re breathing but you’re really just dreaming. You’re walking through the world like a robot, laughing sincerely, smiling genuinely, and doing everything for everyone and nothing for yourself. You try to downplay the seriousness of the fact that you fall asleep at the wheel almost every night because you go into work early, stay late, and then go out with your friends; you pay for them when you got nothing because you claimed you ate earlier when you didn't because you don’t like spending too much money but you know that you get paid more than they do and you feel like it’s your duty to the world to take care of the people you care about. You step up to the plate and hit what could have been a home-run, but you forget to do the running. Your body is shutting down on you and you won’t do anything about it because you’re too busy trying to be everywhere at once instead of being where you are when you’re there. You worry so much about the future and forget about the present, you forget that this life is a gift and you let people take it from you.” And sometimes that girl in the mirror won’t say anything at all, because I won’t even look at her. I stopped looking at her. Then one day she just disappeared. I look at the mirror now, and she isn't there. She left me too. When that day came that she was gone, I realized the severity of the circumstances in which I’d been living.
And I finally decided to change. I go to bed on time and I wake up early, I look in the mirror and though that girl is gone, I can see the outline of another, because she isn't real yet but I’m going to make her real. I walk outside and I feel the sun reaching for me, to lift me up so I can see the world and I can see why it’s beautiful, and I feel the wind caressing my skin, pushing me onward because the birds and the bee’s are waiting for me to succeed. I feel the ground clapping at my every step, encouraging me to make my move, to mark my place, to tell the world I am here to stay.
And I changed. I smile genuinely still, but I smile because I actually am happy, because I can feel it in me now, I can feel my soul coming back to me again. And I realize I owe it to the girl in the mirror who left me, because even my reflection saw me crashing; but she did more for me than I ever did for myself, because the judgment in her eyes was really just her tears, the disdain on her face was wrinkled skin from worrying too much, and the woe in her soul was really just love, love for the person she was forced to watch tear herself apart at the seams, standing by and doing nothing because what can a reflection do?
But she changed me. And as crazy as it sounds, I owe it to my reflection for making me see how unhealthy I was becoming, how I was living for others instead of living for me. And her silence is what got to me, because for a while, all I’d ever thought I needed was silence, but when the day finally came when the world fell silent to me, I realized I needed words; I needed words to say “I need help” to say “I can’t breathe”, to say "I can’t remember who I am." And the day I admitted it was the day that she left, and because she left.
I see her in my dreams now. And last night, I finally saw her smile again.
It took me some time to realize that the girl in the mirror was really my soul, stuck in the reflection of the girl I had portrayed myself to be.
And the day she left was the day I had finally set her free, to let her be who she had always been, to let her bleed when she was bleeding instead of covering up the wounds and pretending she was okay. My soul came back to me, and that has meant more to me than anything else ever will.