I sat on the edge of the bed facing the mirror this morning, as I do every morning, inside my thoughts. I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about, nothing too grim today, just general. I’d had quite a vivid dream, though now I can’t remember what that was about, either.
Yesterday I read to my therapist what I wrote two days ago. She was impressed by the idea of smashing my head into the mirror and breaking both it and myself.
‘That sounds as though the mirror is the life you wish you’d had’ she said, which seems to make sense because of the frustration of the gap between what is there and here. She went on to talk about a theory from someone whose name meant nothing to me, about the image we have of ourselves and how we negotiate our inability to reach it. That sounds banal – of course we all must feel that way – but I expect there’s more to it than that. I pointed out that there’s a physical mirror on the wardrobe by my bed, so inevitably I see my reflection when I get up, but there again, I often use mirrors as a metaphor for my life and relationship with myself.
‘You keep saying the same things’ she went on ‘but every time you say it in a slightly different way, and today it’s smashing the mirror that’s significant.’
Before I went travelling, I was seeing a hypnotherapist (the third time I’d tried that), who in our sessions told me to imagine myself going into a room where there’s a mirror and the image inside it is the woman I want to be, with all the qualities other people see in me that I can’t find in myself. Then I was supposed to enter into the mirror and merge with that person, because ‘she is you’. She made me an audio file, which I used to play every night in bed, till I started screaming back at it: ‘but that’s not really me, can’t you see that?’
There’s a postcard on my desk, propped up in front of the monitor. It turned up a couple of days ago, tucked inside a book. I’ve been staring at it because I couldn’t remember how it got there, or where it came from. It’s a painting by Paul Nash, titled: ‘Landscape From a Dream’, and on the back I’ve written: ‘My book is the story of my journey, the reasons why I went, the places I went to, the things I saw and did, the feelings I had about them’ and addressed it to myself at the old house, which dates it to 2014 after I came back from Prague, when I was failing to write S2S.
I rummaged in the heap on my desk and found the book – called: ‘Show Your Work!’ – it started to make more sense, because I remembered writing the card in the Tate café.
And then I noticed the mirror.