Hey - If you post a good picture or the zoom looked good... then it doesn't matter that you feel sad inside...

We are living in an inverted world.

Even this post is proof of it. My instinct is to be quiet. To listen. To stay out of the center of the room — that's the work I do, that's who I am. And yet here I am, writing something public, pushing my own reflection forward, even while warning against exactly that. Inverted.

When we look at ourselves, we are present and absent at the same time.

That line came from a New York Times guest essay, "All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads" by Catherine Shannon, and it stopped me. We look in the mirror, into the camera, at our own reflection on a screen, and we are somehow both there and not there. Watching ourselves instead of living.

Is it the more we watch ourselves, the less secure we feel. On a Zoom call, we're not really listening to the person talking to us — we're watching our own face react to them. Monitoring our expression. Adjusting our posture. Managing the image instead of being in the conversation. We think all that self-monitoring will make us feel more grounded. It does the opposite. It doesn't.

What's real and what's true gets harder to locate. The mirror — and everything that functions like one now — encourages us to choose a fantasy of ourselves. I don't think the answer is a better mirror. I think the answer is honest gazing — and we get that through relationships, not reflections.

This is the work I do with clients. I'm not another mirror for someone to check themselves in. I try to hold up something more honest — a real gaze, not a performance, not a flattering distortion. Just true.

We don't need more mirrors. We need more honest gazes.