It is an amazing thing to see yourself through somebody else’s eyes. The person you see in the mirror, both literally and metaphorically, is not the same person who is seen by the people around you. We are our own harshest critics. That isn’t an exaggeration.
I think that the most beautiful people are those who see the beauty in others, even when there’s a lot of less-than-exemplary to look past. Of the many people who have come and gone from my life I can say that those who had the biggest hearts and the best intentions have been some of the toughest, roughest, crudest, most insensitive types. And sometimes it’s hard to see past that to the gold shining under the surface. But once you see it, even for a second, it’s like you can’t look away.
I find that these are the people who see me differently too. I’m not exactly rough and tough and crude and insensitive, but “nice” isn’t exactly a word people throw around when they describe me. I tend to hear words like “abrasive personality” and “she grows on you…”
It blows my mind a little when someone stops to tell you what they see. It definitely catches me off guard, and its frequently hard to hear and accept, but it’s a gift. The paradigm shift is like having someone tell you that grass is blue, not green. It just doesn’t sound like what you see at all. But the sincerity with which the words are said cannot be anything but genuine. They’re really telling you what they see before them.
I wish that people were more honest and open about such things, but it seems to be a sort of taboo to really tell someone genuinely what you think of them. I don’t do it much myself, but that’s because I’m an insensitive bitch. But I think that we could all benefit from time to time from someone shaking us out of our memorized and ingrained self image and awakening us to an understanding from an outside perspective.
Think how much we could change ourselves for the better if we stopped only believing in what we saw in the mirror. Think how much our whole world could change if each of us could be our better selves, simply from understanding our impact on one another. It’s not a matter of conforming to the desires of others, or fitting into some cookie cutter mold. It’s about appreciation and conscientiousness, honesty, and even vulnerability.
Just imagine.
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