I am often reminded of what one of my former students used to have as their Twitter bio: “Disappointing my family since 1994”. Many of us are very conscious of all the expectations to which we don’t match up. My wife always says that most people disappoint her in the end.
I don’t look in a mirror very often. I’m not sure what would be “normal”, but I reckon my average is about once per day. Possibly less. Many days I don’t see myself at all. I am not narcissistic on the outside, at least. My Instagram doesn’t have selfies: it has pictures of the view looking out, not the view looking back at me. On the inside, it’s harder to say. The outside world is just a big mirror reflecting us back at ourselves as we peer out from inside. We seem to be looking at the world but in fact we are seeing mainly ourselves in the world’s enveloping context. My Twitter, Facebook, this blog… it’s pretty much me, me, me. “I saw this. I thought that. I am reading these.” And of course our content consists only of the selected things that we are choosing to tell each other that we have read, or thought, or seen. But if you want to know someone, how better than by looking at what they choose to post, what they choose to notice, or at least which of their choices they decide to show you. I don’t look in the mirror every day, but I can’t stop myself from gazing into the deep reflecting lake of choices I have made. By doing so I reinforce my own opinion of myself, and in showing you some of my choices I can pretend that I am showing you some of me.
I don’t feel the compulsion that some people have to curate their physical image and to be selective about what pictures of themselves they allow to be posted. But perhaps I have an equivalent compulsion to curate the visibility of my choices, whether they be choices about what to like, or choices about what to do… how to be. It isn’t really important to me whether you think I look good in a picture. It doesn’t even matter whether you have an accurate picture of what I look like. If you think I’m taller, shorter, or with different a different colour of skin, that’s fine. But if you get the wrong idea about the moral choices I would make when facing a dilemma, or even if you simply don’t realise that I think it’s OK to enjoy both Gustav Mahler and Bananarama, or that I like country walks more than party-nights, that is more serious. Each of us has made decisions about what defines us, and what we therefore need to curate.
Reading through what I have written here, I am unsurprised to see that it is another drip into the pool, similar to most of the drips that went before. An addition to the “me, me, me” collection. It was inevitable. I know about inevitability: not from looking in a mirror on the wall or listening to you tell me how gorgeous I am in my selfies, but from gazing down over the years into my reflecting pool of long ago, and continuing, choices.
Peter G Knight 