Mirrors Freewrite
Needless to say, I was extremely surprised to read that the author, Lucy Grealy, was able to live for an entire year without looking into a mirror. I feel as though it is automatic to look in a mirror once you pass it. But then again, Grealy was hiding from the image that she was going to see once she looked in that mirror. Avoiding mirrors was almost like a sense of denial for her. If she could not see the deformity on her face, it would easier for her not to hate herself.
She had half of her jaw removed in order to prevent cancer from spreading, and the details of her operation are absolutely horrifying. I could not even imagine having people operating on me without my knowing exactly what was going on. At the age of 9, its even worse because it would be more difficult for her to grasp the gravity of what was going on. She was robbed of a normal childhood because of the years she spent in a hospital, and because of the isolation she felt due to her deformity. People in society are so quick to judge things they see to be different or strange, and spare no expense in being kind to people. Grealy mentions that the majority of people who were rude to her were men.
Grealy constantly mentions throughout her essay that she is disgusted by her appearance. Whether it was her baldness during her chemotherapy, or her deformed jaw, she was always ashamed of what she saw. However, when it came to an opportunity to fix her appearance, she was not comfortable with the idea of fixing it. She originally thought that people stared at her because she was bald. But when women donated wigs for her to wear, she was frightened of them. At the end of the novel, when her reconstructive surgery was effective and she was having a conversation with a man, she was in disbelief. She even described herself as “reluctant” to believe that this man was giving her positive feedback. She ends the essay with an overall positive tone because she actually wants to see herself in the mirror instead of hiding from her image. But the blurb in the beginning of the essay implies that she eventually killed herself because of her disconnection from her identity. Grealy reminds me a little bit of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. Both were uncomfortable with their roles as women and suffered severe depression.
I liked how Grealy ended the passage by actually wanting to see her reflection. However, it was difficult for me as a reader to connect to Grealy and understand why she dealt with her problems the way she did. This passage definitely was the more horrifying of the two and more eye-opening. Everyone deals with pressure to look a certain way and does not always feel comfortable with their own reflection, so that was really interesting to read about. Obviously most people do not have to deal with that issue to the extreme that Grealy did. Reading this passage would make anyone more sympathetic and kinder to those who have to go through difficult obstacles such as this.