I have a strange theory.
Sometimes during depressive episodes, I look into the mirror, and see my mother and father’s faces so clearly in my own that the experience evokes strong feelings of anger and self-hatred. I imagine that I am becoming them and I can’t escape it. I feel so angry that my biological connection to them has doomed me to a lifetime of seeing their faces whenever I look at myself.
I was thinking about how powerful facial recognition is, and what a strong “neural” bond we must form, in our early years especially, to the images of our parents’ faces. What then happens in our brains when later in life, we look into a mirror, and see those same parental patterns?
I think something strange happens. I think it confuses the hell out of our brain on some level. Perhaps the eventual ubiquity of the mirror did something strange to the arc of our human story. Maybe we were never meant to look at our own reflections so deliberately over time.
Maybe being forced by cultural habit to look in the mirror daily forces us to disconnect from the powerful imprint of our parents’ faces (as a sort of benign, energy-saving coping mechanism). I wonder what the positive and negative consequences of this would be, if this is actually what happens…
Self portrait, 2007
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