Evidence that mirrors don't always tell the truth

I bought one of these a few years back. 

It's called a Vanity Magnifying Mirror. So, first, let's deal with the misnomer: you can either have vanity (definition: excessive pride in one's own appearance), or you can have a magnifying mirror.

Here's a description of my daily encounter with the magnifying mirror:

1. Stand it on the windowsill in the light.

2. Look into it.

3. Cringe backwards, crying, 'Surely that's the surface of the MOON! Or a shelled battlefield!'

The problem is, over the years since I've owned the mirror, I think I've normalised that image of myself so that I think that's what everyone else is seeing. That's the danger of these mirrors. And yet, the reality is this:

1. I don't get up so close to people, staring and almost touching them with my nose, as I do to the mirror. You'll know this is true already, because I am not writing this from a prison cell.

2. People don't have highly-magnified x-ray vision, unless they're aliens, in which case they'll be comfortable with the moon thing.

3. My body is usually moving around when I'm with other people, not held in the rigormortis of horrified reaction as I am with the mirror. 

4. My face is usually moving around when I'm with other people. I find this stops them from leaning over to check for a pulse.

And, more importantly than any of that ....

5. No one really cares about the surface of my face. 

In Sylvia Plath's 'Mirror' poem, she explores a woman's feelings about her image but by writing in the voice of the mirror itself. It's an astounding poem, shocking and true. I often use it at school, challenging the students to guess what the object in the poem is without showing them the title, and then getting them to write about an inanimate object in their own house, 'interviewing' it to see how it feels about its life. Here's Plath's poem. 

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Those last two lines are killer lines, and as true as the dawn. See my earlier points ...