Regarding faces and the kindergarten identity crisis

Photo from tumblr.

Until I turned thirteen, I didn’t know what my face looked like.

I knew I had a face, of course. When I looked into the mirror, I could see very human features: a nondescript nose, uninspiring eyes, an existing mouth. That must be me in the reflection, I thought. And I knew other people’s faces very well: Mackenzie, my best friend since age four, had shockingly red hair that covered the acne on her forehead, and Maggie, a girl who I envied for her general spoiledness, had dark eyebrows that joined nearly in the center of her face. Mrs. Grills, our teacher, had a very straight nose and lots of wrinkles near her eyes.

If you asked me what color my eyes were, I’d say brown. If you asked me what color my hair was, I’d say black. If you asked me what shape my nose was… etc.

Whenever my eyes left the mirror, however, I could never remember what I looked like. Until I turned thirteen, I was simply a spirit looking out of a window, surrounded by the windowpane of my glasses and the flowerbox of my blurred nose. I could not paint a self-portrait when asked. My face eluded me, and vanished like the shattered and mismatched slideshow of a dream.

The truth was, I had never associated me, my essence, my thoughts, with the body I was contained in. Certainly, my body served its function well: it allowed me to speak when I had to, to run wildly in the playground when I wanted to, and to cry into my mother’s arms when I needed to. In my mind, my nose wasn’t long or short. My hair, with unexceptional length and color, dwelled above my head. My eyes were an average width apart, an average size, and an average color. I identified myself in group photos as the ‘default human,’ the mannequin without any customization of the face. I was not arrestingly beautiful or gut-wrenchingly ugly. It was like I lived in a first-person video game, where the protagonist exists as a screen into the online world.

I did not know then that I am an individual in other people’s lives, that people look at me and see distinct features, that I am a non-playable character in their first-person video game. When I turned thirteen, I saw myself clearly for the first time. My face lost its amorphousness and grew brittle under the weight of my skin. I obsessed over the weird shape of my eyes, the thinness of my eyebrows, the bizzare shape of my cheeks. I glanced into whatever reflective surface I could find to remember these flaws and despair over my imperfection. I reminded myself to push my hair a certain way, to apply a little makeup here and there, to hold my head up to avoid the double-chin phenomenon. It didn’t just matter what I said, but also how I presented it; people would treat me the way I looked, and I began to model the projection of my image in my head.

That was the end of my journey as a wandering soul.