The Girl in the Mirror

There’s a particular ache that comes when you feel unseen. It settles in the chest like a stone, quiet but heavy, as if the very air must pass around it before you can breathe again. I’ve been thinking about this lately, about the people I love most and how sometimes I feel they are looking right through me, past me, as though they are nodding toward a figure they’ve imagined.

All my life I’ve longed to be known. Isn’t that what we all want, to be recognized for the true shape of our souls? Yet the older I get, the more I wonder whether I’ve been living as someone else’s reflection. Maybe the misunderstanding lies not in them, but in me. Perhaps I never stopped long enough to meet my own gaze without the mirrors others hold up.

I wonder if I became one of “those women” who quietly put her dreams in a locked box, offering her days to the people she loved so they might never leave her. Did I braid myself into a rope of service, binding myself to safety, disguising the fear of abandonment as devotion?

I polish myself for the world, a little shine here, a little laughter there, as if glitter might keep anyone from noticing the tender rawness underneath. But no matter how bright I make the surface, I never feel luminous enough. Enough for whom? Enough for what?

Some days I think God must know me in a way I can’t yet claim for myself. There is a presence that has always seen me whole, even when I have not. Still, I flinch when my loved ones speak their version of me aloud. I wince, offended, though they’re only holding up the mirror I gave them.

When I put those mirrors down, I don’t know if I will have the courage to keep walking. I fear I’ll turn around and find no one behind me, only silence where the cheering used to be. They may say I’ve changed. They may whisper I’m no longer that girl—the reliable one, the giving one, the one who kept nothing for herself.

But what if that girl was never the truth? What if the truth waits like a seed buried deep in the soil of me, pressing upward, asking to see the sun?

How about you? Have you been misdefined your whole life, hemmed in by stories that never belonged to you? Do you wake each morning into the life you meant to build, or the one that someone else drafted? Do you know your own name, the secret one that was written for you before anyone else had a say?

I can see now that the misunderstanding was not a crime anyone committed against me—it was a bargain I made. I gave myself away piece by piece, for love, for belonging, for the safety of staying. I wanted so badly to be chosen that I became a shadow of myself.

But a shadow cannot grow roots. A shadow cannot bloom.

And so I am thinking of stepping forward—quietly, but surely. Not away from anyone, not against anyone, but toward myself. The seed is ready. The soil has waited long enough.

Let’s see what happens.

Hari Om Tat Sat