Mirrorballs, Lighthouses and Other Mortifying Ordeals
By Faith Geiger
Illustration by Honey Simatupang
For as long as I can remember, there is a certain desire I have carried the weight of. For as long as I have been able to think and speak — for as long as I have been aware that I am a person — I have felt the never-ending hunger to be liked, with a singeing need to be loved following close behind.
I don’t just mean that in the romantic sense; although the need for it, too, pathetically seeps its way into too many of my dreams. It holds too much weight in too many of the decisions I make. What I really want is the simple fact of universal acceptance. It is my largest and most impossible wish: I want everyone I meet to like me. To be disliked feels like a threat to my worth and well-being. Even indifference comes with a sting sometimes.
I believe wholeheartedly in the power of vulnerability, but practicing it myself is difficult. The notion of sharing enough of myself for people to make a judgment of me is terrifying. I know their judgments won’t all be positive. I even make the judgments for them (right now, for example, writing this, I sound callow, irredeemably insecure, and astonishingly self-important) so that anything they have to say about me can at least not be weaponized with the added claim of a lack of self-awareness. And if I am already aware of my flaws, perhaps it will hurt less when other people find them –– perhaps I can prevent other people from finding them at all. So I become my own worst critic, and I spiral into self-betrayal in the name of self-preservation.
“That sounds exhausting,” is what my therapist said to me when I led her through this thought process.
People oftentimes talk about therapy like the end-all, be-all of self-improvement. Like you can spend a few months speaking to a miracle worker and all your neuroses will disappear under their careful guidance and pieces of quippy wisdom that can conveniently fit into viral tweets. Anyone who has actually spent time in therapy will likely tell you that this is not the case.
My therapist, Debora, is certainly no miracle worker, but she does supply some occasional quippy wisdom.
When I told Debora that I can’t stand the idea that anyone might feel negatively towards me, that all I’ve ever wanted is for everyone to like me, and that I’d go to great lengths to achieve that, she replied, “Oh, but then it wouldn’t be nearly as special when people loved you.”
It’s such a simple, old, even cliche idea: you can’t have the sunshine without the rain, the stars wouldn’t shine without the dark. And yet each time it is presented to me in a new way, it feels like an epiphany that I, alone, needed to experience.
It became clear to me then that when I try to be anything other than true to myself while attempting to form connections, those connections are inherently false. They don’t even have the chance to be authentic, which is to say there is no point. No end result that could matter in any real way.
Even if I were to succeed in all of my efforts to make everyone on this entire Earth love me by morphing into the version of myself that is easiest for them to love, no one would actually love me at all. To serve only as a vessel for the appeasement of others is to live a life without meaningful connections –– even with yourself.
That afternoon, shivering in the park I had walked to for the privacy I always seek during my teletherapy sessions, a realization drenched me in a sweet, long-sought sense of ease: in order to be universally liked, I would have to deny myself the opportunity to be authentically loved. And I knew, easily, which choice I would make between the two.
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I have long found comfort in Taylor Swift’s confessional songwriting. Her lyrics are a salve for my perpetually adolescent heart, the part of me that never outgrew the fifteen-year-old tendency of only wanting to be wanted. “Taylor Swift stole my diary,” girls like me used to joke in middle school. I still feel this way sometimes.
Swift’s song “Mirrorball” is no different, and I’m not alone in the way I relate to its lyrics. Online, fans have claimed the song as a signifier of an archetype they’ve created for themselves, defined by people-pleasing, over-achieving and the compulsion to self-efface for the sake of acceptance.
The last verse, especially, cuts to the core of this compulsion: “I’ve never been a natural,” Swift sings, “All I do is try, try, try.” But what good does all that trying do? What good is it to still be “trying everything to keep you looking at me” if in the end you will only “break [into] a million pieces”?
I look at the shattering of Swift’s titular mirrorball as a cautionary tale; a reminder of the particular pain I’ve felt so many times before, a reason to do the work and break the curse I’ve put on myself.
When you sacrifice your sense of self for the sake of other people, you have nothing to hold onto when you’re broken. Each piece belongs to someone else. When your false connections eventually fall flat, when the house of mirrors you’ve built around yourself shatters, when there’s nobody around to reflect anymore, what’s left of you?
I want there to be something left. I want there to be everything left. I want to be made of more than reflections. Not a mirrorball, but a lighthouse, so unashamedly bright that everyone who is meant to love me knows exactly where to find me. I want to be so sure of myself that I never have to question that love or its basis.
There is a quote from Jenny Slate’s book, Little Weirds, that I return to time and time again: “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.” Slate aptly titled this “A Prayer”; I treat it as one.
It would be false to say that, even after all of these realizations, I want to be loved any less than I ever have. I think the need for love is natural and human and one that I will never outgrow. But I know now that in order to be loved in any way that matters, I have to release the overwhelming fear that my worth depends on it.
I have nearly lost myself more times than one in my fear-driven efforts to be loved. It is a suffocating task to be a mirrorball. It puts a nearly unbearable strain on your heart to force yourself to anticipate the ways in which you’ll have to shift, the pieces of yourself you’ll have to pare away: the loud laugh to tame, the music to pretend you don’t love, the text messages to rephrase in order to sound less needy, the emotional boundaries to dissolve and the self-respect to sacrifice for one small ounce of validation from someone that could maybe love some version of you someday if you’re good enough at shapeshifting.
There is no real connection born from that. No real understanding or joy. No relief, which I find to be one of the most desirable and telling attributes of love. All the love I’ve known to be true has been defined by the specific comfort that comes with knowing that someone could see the ugliest parts of you and choose to stick around anyway. Love is defined by the relief of not having to play any sort of role, of coming as you are and knowing you will still be cared for. What is love without that? What is life without it?
In “I Know What You Think of Me,” Tim Kreider summarizes these sentiments in a more succinct way than I am able to: “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
Kreider describes a friend’s dream involving a staircase that reveals everything people have ever said about you when you weren’t around; to get to the highest compliments at the bottom, you have to first descend and endure hearing all of the terrible things people say behind your back. Whether we will ever hear them or not, these things are said by the people who love us. It is an unavoidable side effect of authenticity.
My own anxiety around vulnerability not only lies in the what-ifs of what others are saying behind my back but also in the simple facts of who I know myself to be — all the ways in which I will always be too much, the ways in which I will never be enough, the worry that all I am as a person is some irredeemably unlovable mix of the two.
But I know the parts of myself I’ve deemed unlovable are the same parts I must eventually bare if I ever want to allow myself the experience of being known, of being understood, of being loved completely –– not for some curated version of myself that is only ever half true, but for who I really am without any effort. And I am not ashamed to admit that under all of my fear, that’s truly all I want out of life. I want it much more than I’ve ever wanted to be liked. It is a trade-off for which I am willing to give up the whole fight. And what an exhausting fight it has been; what a freeing feeling to let myself give it up. ♦