Nothing Unseen: Vanity Revealed | Teen Ink

Nothing Unseen: Vanity Revealed

May 15, 2012
By BethWrite, Franklin, Tennessee
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BethWrite, Franklin, Tennessee
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I hardly ever spare the time to look up into it anymore. I know what I’ll see every time I look into the reflection pool mounted on the wall above the sink in my bathroom. I’ll see an awkward, ugly, clumsy, pimple faced girl that I know that no one wants to talk to let alone be friends with. If I was homeschooled I wouldn’t be tortured by the thought of me obviously not being recognized for existing let alone being important to society. Why do I let these thoughts pass through my head? I, like every teenager at some point, question the real value of a single person’s actual importance to live or inhabit the planet. If this thought doesn’t pass through your head then you are probably questioning why it’s so important to preserve others when you are actually the most important thing inhabiting the planet which was made specifically for you. Such dark thoughts for not even having yet to cross the threshold of the place called middle school.
Some say I have a dark, sick sense of humor.
But I say oh I’m just a late bloomer.
The world is my page,
and I shall scrawl my words and perform on the stage.

Most of the classes are over. Yes, finally a class where my mind could be at ease, English. For most people English is “blah blah poetry blah blah blah grammar blah on exam.” For me English is a place of writing, a place where you can express yourself, yet masquerade it as being only words dangling together like a strand of pearls. I don’t particularly like our teacher and she doesn’t particularly like me, but then who really does like me. At the conclusion of our class I looked to the largest bore, most annoying part of my day, Lunch. It’s not that I don’t like to eat or don’t like what I eat, but it is the environment that I am forced to eat in. I must eat my food while I am surrounded by idiotic hooligans that our society calls teenage boys to whom it is amusing to act more like the primates in which they have evolved from than to act as if in the evolutionary stage in which the rest of society is currently poised. It is definitely not that I would ever make such a mistake as to sit with them or even to sit with the other students who either wished or pretended to be something or someone they are not, or they chose to drool over someone who actually is what they want to be. No, I made the smart decision to sit at a table by myself, for it just works best for everybody. I know no one wants to sit with me, so why would I inconvenience anyone by attempting to sit or force conversation with people who would act like they want to be with me. There is a group that invites me to eat lunch with them and hang after school with them, yet they would really be screaming in their mind about how much they really had come to hate me and begun to wish I would just disappear, for good.
“It is funny how I can be surrounded by a sea of people,
yet I can still feel so alone.”

I have come to the conclusion these days of my life are like movie scenes played on loop with the only change being different lines are said on each repetition of the loop. During English class today Ms. Cameron told us that we were going to do a creative writing piece, it could be in any genre and could be about anything. She told us to explore, to let our minds wander, and to discover ourselves through our writing.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love to write. I’m just not comfortable to write about discovering myself, or anything about myself. I’m better at death, loss, and destruction. They make a harder impact on the reader, so does that make me a bad writer because I can’t make an impression without using a topic that makes an impression?
That night, I decided to at least decide on my topic or how I would frame my piece. I couldn’t think of a topic that reflected me. I went into the bathroom and I did what I almost never do. I just sat there and stared at myself, but it was not out of sheer vanity. Some say the eyes are windows to the soul, but my train of thought was if I first understand who I was on the outside maybe I could understand who I was on the inside. It was no use. The only thing I saw and will ever see is the ugly runt duckling who will never transform into a beautiful swan. My lack of understanding of myself confused me. My confusion frustrated me. My frustration made my blood boil and my skin glimmered with sweat and made my pores vent heat and steam like factory pipes. I laid my burning forehead on the cool glass and slowly closed my eyes and open them to clear and focus on an exact thought, my topic, but instead of focusing my thoughts, I went tumbling forward through the glass.
The mirror, the mirror I never understood
Until the day, until that day I really stopped and looked

I expected death and I received life, I think. I expected darkness and I got light, I thought. The place, if I can call it a place, that I landed in, if I really did land, is strange. It is not that there is only the color of white in this….. place, but more that there is an absence of color like the purest view you shall see. It is not that it was quiet, but there was an absence of sound, like sound hadn’t quite gotten there yet. I tried to travel yet when I moved there was no difference of the scenery around me and when I was standing, nothingness. I didn’t tire or have any wish to sleep or eat or anything. All I wanted was to breath, let my heart beat, to let myself live, to live for a second. I do not know how long I stood there with my eyes closed and one thought in my head as if it were etching into the backs of my eyelids. When I finally opened my eyes, the mirror, my mirror, was not floating in nor on anything, not mounted on or against anything, yet there it was as plain as I could see. It was my mirror, but it bore no dings or marks or scrapes as the one in the other world did, for it was flawless or as close to perfect as I can describe perfect in this or in any other world. It was not as if it was just a brand new one. It was as if it was the perfect version which no human could construct but only the mind could create. I looked at myself in the mirror and I did not see the ugly, awkward girl that I tried hard not to look at every morning. When I looked in the mirror in this world, I saw what I wanted to be. Yet I didn’t know that I wanted to be different, at least not in that way, not in the way the mirror portrayed me. I was captivated by what I saw. I was not awkward, for I was slender and graceful. I was not ugly, for I was beautiful, mysterious, and complex. I was complex and mysterious in such a way that you are just dying to figure it out, and beautiful in a way that just pulls you onto the trail to find it all out. This time out of sheer vanity I went to stroke the mesmerizing image reflected in the glass. As my fingers touched the glass I felt myself being pulled back into the cold, harsh world I knew. I squinted as my eyes adjusted to the stupid fluorescent light. Why couldn’t the stupid lights here work the same as the ones in the mirror world?
Beauty, perfection, Vanity
Ugly, flawed, unpretentious

The events at school no longer matter. It is now easy to see how to write a paper about myself, for I could have chosen no better topic than myself. There is still a group that asks me to sit with them at lunch or hang after school, but there are just acting for a charity case. They do not understand my true importance for they have not gazed upon my perfect form as I have.

The mirror process which is of actual humane importance, and yes there is a process. The first step is to enter from the real world into the perfect mirror world in which everything is the spectrum of beauty, for all is in perfect form. Second is purification and preparation, and this is when I walk around and allow myself time to clear my brain in preparation to call the mirror. I call the mirror through the cleaning and focusing of my mind on one thought and close my eyes and then when my eyes open, the mirror of perfection is there. I gaze upon myself until I choose to transport myself back to the imperfect world. Every time I come out I realize more and more things that are so flawed and defective that just makes it harder to come out. Why can’t this world just be perfect?
Mirror Mirror on the wall
I am the fairest one of all
Above my vanity you hang and into you I can see
Into your depths I look and my vanity I do see

I guess people started to notice that I was acting unordinary which is odd since I didn’t think people did notice me in the first place. Amanda, Emily, Mat, Adam, and Carson, all redoubled their efforts to get me to participate or at least get out and do something with them. Over a span of a week they were so persistent and adamant to get me to come bowling or to go for pizza after school. The thought occurred to me that if they were really only trying to act nice and act like they were reaching out when it was only an empty gesture, they would have given up by now. If it was genuine, as I am now begining to perceive it, then maybe I should take them up on their offer. The only way to see if they actually wanted to get to know me, I dare not say or hope, to become friends with me was to take them up on their offer. The thought was almost scary, friends.
Amanda and Mat were in my English class and I sat near them, like I never do, and passed them a note, which I’ve never actually done. When Amanda and Mat read the note, a smile spread across their faces.
Sorry there are no words to say here
because I don’t understand what happened
even when I look back on it now.

I am back within the perfect mirror world, but I have not summoned the mirror. Now, I have no desire to gaze upon myself. In the time I spent with Amanda, Mat, Carson, Emily, and Adam, I realized the true form of my vanity. Strange right, I learned and came to understand my own state of self-absorbedness by spending time with people who I think are frightened by my vanity. They made me realize that I did not need to burrow or bury my thoughts and even more so my soul inside of myself, but I should let it be express through my action and even more my thoughts and writings. Yes, we went bowling, we ate pizza, and I had a really fun time. I realized how much I missed by cutting myself off from everyone else, and it only hurt me by doing so.
“I realized I had realization. It’s really true
I realized I was real and
so was everything else.”

How can I show you how I felt? How can you understand my anger, my hate, my utter and complete almost perfectly sick loathing? I hated myself for being so hypnotized, my mind for being so controlled, and that mirror.
It controlled me. It used me, but did it really? I don’t know what it did, for if it did, I was the one to let it do it to me. Oh good, another thing I can hate. How could there have been so much good around me that I was almost blinded, yet I could wallow away my time in my own little world? There is enough sadness and despair in the world that my petty disturbances are unnecessarily heaped on top.
I am...? After what I’ve experienced it will be awhile before I can understand all of this, so I’ll just quote Emily Dickinson.
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?

I finally decided on what I would write my paper about. I decided not to write it about my own self-discovery but about the discovery of my ego or my true vanity and wish for self-perfection. I wanted everyone to know who I was but I didn’t want them to think they had me all figured out. After all I am a girl of mystery and complexity. I wanted to write it at the heart of my foundation of my arrogant thinking, so I wrote it in the mirror world.
“I originally believed that I found this world to help me discover myself. I have realized, I found it to help me discover the real world.” was my first sentence. It was the first imperfect thing I forced that mirror to reflect. The mirror could not make my writing perfect for it was true. My piece transformed me and my understanding. The paper became about how the mirror was not perfect. It was not because it could only show you an image of your true vanity, but its flaw was that it could not show you your flaws. The mirror could then not see nor understand its own flaws. I wrote my paper about a true experience. I wrote my essay about a true story, my story. My story about finding the mirror and the world. No one would ever believe it. Everyone in Ms. Cameron’s class would think “What a great story” or “Wow, I didn’t know she could write so well”.
My story was true but no one would believe it.
My story was public but no one would read it.
Something is out there that shall be heard.



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