An odd thing happened the other day. I caught my reflection in a passing window and as I saw myself I realized that I’d finally grown into my own face.
I have, at 53, passed through one of those strange, invisible life-moment curtains. Pictures of my younger self look odd to me now. So much black hair. Not dark hair, inky black. And what a round, unformed lump of a head I had. Now my head is mostly bare. What hair there is is white and speckled with a hint of the former blackness. There are not so much wrinkles as folds. This big, block of a head now fits my frame.
Up until now an unplanned reflection would surprise me. “I don’t look like that, do I?” But now in the mirror I see me, not some imagined me. What I see in the mirror is my own intelligence and humanity and the years of living. I see me.
It’s not that I ever cared much about my appearance other than staying as neat and presentable as possible. There just wasn’t that much to work with. I now think that this is my face for the rest of my life. Things will change a bit, the folds will grow larger, deeper. I might get rid of the remnants of hair altogether. But here I am. It’s a relief.
This revelation isn’t something that I looked for or struggled towards. It is a pleasant surprise. It makes me wonder if there were other such revelations waiting for me earlier if I’d only paused long enough to find them, to see them staring back at me in a passing shop window.
Henry Higgins finds his revelation too late (He does in the play. It’s the main failing of the musical that Eliza comes back). I’ll now try and be more open so see what life is trying to tell me.
Who do you see looking back at you from your mirror?
The I’ve Grown Accustomed To My Face by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.