The Key to Self-Image

Self-image is your single greatest determinant of happiness.

It is at once local to your being and ethereally distant.

Its distance results from our penchant to transfer self-image to the perceptions of others—or, rather, to our imagination of their perceptions.

The mirror of self is a mirror of our impression of others and our perceived reflection in their eye.

It is too simplistic to call this sheer out-pictured fantasy. It is a yin-yang of perception and event.

The problem with self-image, as I see it, is one of self-improvement—wholly, justly, and deeply felt.

That which appears in the mirror of the psyche and that which appears in the perceived mirror of the other gazing back at us is amenable to agency.

Is that wholly so? Can loss or objective failure or deficit—as self-deemed—be accepted, remedied, or changed? Must it be?

For some, the answer lies in retreat. For some, in effort. For some, ideally, in acceptance.

I cannot write of acceptance. I have never known it.

If you, like me, regard acceptance as conceptually alienating or unwanted, and if retreat is too dreary and anesthetizing an option—I consider it a kind of death—then effort is the one labor before you.

I say: embrace it.

There exist two kinds of effort, and in this some readers may dislike my choices: 1) that which fails, and 2) that which succeeds.

The evil queen in Snow White—I speak of the Grimm Brothers’ early nineteenth century fairy tale derived from folk tradition—is foiled not because she is wrong in seeking to elevate her beauty above Snow White’s. But because she fails to pay the debt for it.