Self image
When I was at university, I had a period when I would spend a lot of time looking into the mirror. I would stare at myself, observing every detail of my face. Thinking back, I don’t remember why I did it, but I do remember that it would calm me down significantly. It was also how I discovered my first few grey hairs at the age of 22. Later on, my habit just disappeared by itself. The need to stare into the mirror just wasn’t there anymore.
Yesterday afternoon, it returned. It started in the mirror in a dressing room, and continued when I got home and then again this morning. The big difference is that this time it wasn’t my face I was staring at, it was my legs. Or rather, the cloth covering my legs. After a short period of trying on new trousers and not finding what I wanted, I made the sudden decision to buy a pair of jeans. This has now become one of the most uncomfortable experiences I can remember.
The important thing about these jeans is that they mark the end of a 17 year long period. As a young teenager I decided that I was tired of trying on all these uncomfortable variations of blue with their obscure names that needed a mapping to explain what they meant in terms of how they would fit on my body. And the reality was that none of them ever did fit. 17 years later, jeans still come with obscure names that mean nothing to me and there are more variations on blue than there used to be, but my body has found a new shape and the jeans have actually become comfortable to wear. For the legs, not for the mind.
I was shocked to find a pair of jeans thrown over my chair this morning. It was as if someone else had been in our bedroom and put them there. They could certainly not be mine. But after I had showered and had breakfast it was I who put the jeans on. Later on, it was I who wore the jeans when going shopping for a carbonated low calorie soft drink with vegetable extracts with sweeteners. But when I looked down where my legs used to be, it was someone else’s legs that were moving me forward. There was just no way my brain could acknowledge that those jeans wearing legs could be mine. It’s all a bit surreal right now.
