When I went home for Thanksgiving, I stayed at my mother's house, a place I had refused to call home for 6 years of my life. My mirror, a wall-length monstrosity that spanned across my dresser and reflected my every move, was gone.
I have the annoying tendency to reflect on any and every part of my life, every aspect of my identity. This habit is helpful in approximately three situations: therapy, diaries, and annoying colleagues and potential friends.
This self-reflection has gotten so aggressively out of control, it's become a trope of sorts--Kira the person who sorts through her emotions and wonders, what does it mean?
And so, as one does when trying to escape their problems, I fled across the country. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to start a new life? To just do, without having to think? No more reflections!
When I moved to my new apartment, I was greeted by a full-sized mirror the size of my closet door. It was, as a matter of fact, my actual closet door. A quarter of my room consisted of reflections. A quarter of my LIFE consisted of reflections.
What a fantastic starting metaphor.
Besides the horrendous recognition that I would have to greet my naked face every god-awfully early morning, I realized that it wasn't realistic or feasible to get through grad school on autopilot, unthinking and unaware. After receiving my first written assignment which was to literally reflect on my life and my background, I realized that such anti-reflective rhetoric was not encouraged.
As it turns out, grad school is really therapy in disguise*. And so, the re-reflections began.
A few weeks into classes, an odd shift began to take place. By seeing what was--my classes, my weekends holed up in my room writing, my stilted biweekly calls with my father--I began to reflect on what wasn't. It's as though my past was right smack dab in the middle of my obnoxiously large mirror. As I saw my crippling imposter syndrome in teaching and writing at a graduate level, I saw an anxiety issue I had let slide, hoping it would go away. In watching myself spend Saturday after Saturday writing papers, I saw a lack of personal values. In going through the scripted small talk with my father, I saw the questions we weren't asking--that we were too afraid to ask.
I send reflections of my face to my boyfriend with our daily "good morning" selfies. I smile and look happy. What he doesn't see is the fear that I am not good enough.
I've taken these reflections to more familiar mediums: journal entries, calls with my best friend, rants to my mother. Some groundbreaking, others mundane. Yet in "mature reflections," as I like to flatter myself by coining them, I see an understanding of values I had otherwise been blind to.
As much as I humored my past self by claiming I was full of revolutionary reflections, only now do I realize I had been on autopilot and spent my free time worrying. Worrying, as it turns out, is far different and far less productive than reflecting. By observing a highly academic family, I reasoned that school and acceptance into the academic world far outweighed other priorities, be it family, self care, or love. In late high school and early college, I grew addicted to my father's pride and pats on the back when I brought home high marks and sophisticated papers. I accepted these core values, and my father's pride became my pride.
When I called my father, asking what he thought about a Thanksgiving visit home, I had not seen my family in three months. I was delighted by the prospect of coming home after spending a challenging, rigorous semester writing and trying to figure out how to teach. I was met with the following response:
I don't think that's a good idea. You'll want to use that time to focus on your work.
Those words shattered me.
To be perfectly fair, my father is not a bad guy. He is a wonderfully kind, supportive dad and only wants the best for his kids. Yet his words reflected back to me a priority that consisted of work and an ability to climb the ivory tower. The best for his kids, in my father's eyes, reflects his own ambitions and needs: the key value here is academic success. When I talk to my dad, it's almost strictly about grad school. In relaying his graduate experiences to me as advice, he is reflecting on the glory days, the times he played guitar with his buddies and read Emerson around campfires.
He tried to give me a guitar on my trip to Colorado.
This painful reminder of what isn't, of what won't be, I can begin to reflect on and build my own core values: to always put family first. To know when to stop working. To reclaim academia as my own, and to know when it's time to leave.
As I drive to the grocery store and glance at my car's rearview mirror, I see myself leaving behind fear: fear of disappointing those around me, of being "found out."
There are times, however, to stop reflecting. To stop wondering.
There is a duck pond on CSU's campus. The water reflects the duck's faces, but the ducks remain uninterested; they continue to look forward, never down. They are aware that the water is beneath them, and yet these ducks are able to simply just be. Underneath the water, the ducks' legs are working hard to remain afloat, but to our eyes, they are happy to float. They aren't wondering where they were or where they should be. They are exactly where they need to be.
As I look at my mirror and smile on my way to class, I remind myself to be the duck. I may wonder more, but I am exactly where I need to be.
