Millions of Mirrors

One day, at around age sixteen, I decided to take my bike to the countryside and find a remote area where I could scream.

That was the plan.

To ride as far as I could until the houses became sparse, and finally disappeared, and only the woods remained. Then hide my bike somewhere in the bushes by the roadside and venture deep into the forest where no one could see or hear me.

And then just scream.

If I scream hard enough, I thought, maybe I’ll feel like myself again. Maybe it’ll make this mass inside me move and force all the shattered pieces back together again. And maybe then – I can get myself back again?

I was lost, you see. Completely.

A profound change had recently occurred in my life, which had turned my world upside down. What started the change – I’ll return to that part later. But for now, I’ll explain it like this: The transformation in me had left me completely helpless, because it had fundamentally changed how I operated in the world.

I suddenly felt compelled to do something I was completely unfamiliar with – I felt the need to remove all my masks and stop acting.

That was the monumental task: To be myself!

But I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do that. Not anymore, not after all those years.

I’d become so used to acting, and done it for so long, that by now it was like a second skin to me, like breathing. It was constant. I always acted – I acted myself! To the outsider, it may have looked genuine, which was perfect to me, because that’s exactly how I’d planned it, to fool everyone. I wanted them to think that this was who I really was. But it wasn’t me at all – all people ever saw was a show, an ambitious production put together by me, myself, and I, where I was both the actor and director at the same time, constantly monitoring my face, voice, and body, to achieve the exact reaction in people that I wanted.

I had no idea how to let that go.

I didn’t have a clue who I was behind all my masks.

But if I scream, I thought, I can scream my feelings back…if I scream hard enough? I’ll lose myself in the moment, and that’ll fix this confusion. I’ll find my feelings again, and the world will go back to normal. I’ll be myself again, able to walk, talk, and think like a normal person…

But it wasn’t that simple.

I had lost my center.

I made this confusing discovery during lunchtime at school one day.

I stood in the noisy lunch line, sliding my tray along the counter. Next to me, one of my classmates, the class clown, entertained his little crowd by reciting the weekly lunch menu in made-up German. Everything sounds ridiculous in made-up German. Wanting to fit in, I tried to add something to the joke, only to see it fail miserably – to my complete surprise. My words remained hanging above our heads in an awkward silence.

No one laughed.

I used to know how to do this, I thought, mortified.

From then on, the awkwardness became my daily companion.

To sit next to my classmates in the cafeteria was a nightmare. When they spoke, all I could think of was how to join the conversation naturally. I had suddenly forgotten how to do that. I saw their lips move, but I couldn’t hear a word they said because, while they spoke, I was trying to sift through a hundred other random thoughts that were suddenly there. For example, I got stuck focusing on every tiny motion my hand made when I brought the fork to my mouth. Also, my lips, tongue, and nose, and what they were doing, and how they handled the fork. Not to mention the chewing…

All of a sudden, every basic task seemed so complicated.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too, said a voice deep within me. You can’t be the puppet and the hand that controls it at the same time. Somewhere along the line, something’s got to give.

There was a strange orchestra of voices that had suddenly moved into my head, a whirlwind of arbitrary thoughts flying around, bombarding me with the most ridiculous things about who knows what. When I walked next to my – soon-to-be ex – friends out on the town, I couldn’t focus on anything they said, because of the endless hullabaloo and nonsense going on inside my head:

Right hand swings out at the same time as the left foot! Pay attention! Opposite limbs take turns! This is how you walk if you want to appear normal – right hand, left foot. Unless you secretly want to be a camel? Then –same foot, same arm! But do we want that? This looks strange and is not how people walk. No! Have you thought about it? How people walk, versus camels? Have you untangled it? Really thought it through? Yes, or no? Answer! No, not irrelevant at all! This may be the most important question of all time, for you, me, and everybody. That, as well as: What is the camel doing right now? Over there in Africa. Does it know about you? And more importantly: what do your FRIENDS know? Do they know you have a party inside your head, or do you still pass as normal?

It happened at home, too. I discovered it during our special Independence Day dinner. Normally, my role at these dinners was to play the part of the black sheep of the family; the grumpy, truth-telling teenage rebel. Usually, there was a lot of teeth clenching and forced breathing on my end, as I tried to power through the dinner show in one piece.

We had our routines—an unspoken family dynamic where each of us played a role. My mom and my sister, Sonja, dominated the conversation, which usually centered on either excessive flattery or criticizing someone for their bad behavior—behavior neither of them could admit to in themselves—which irritated me to no end. I would then typically call them out on it, calling them hypocrites, which they always denied as a solid front. They had each other’s backs. My mom’s long-time boyfriend didn’t participate in any of it, but he usually wrinkled his nose at my comments, so it was clear whose side he was on. It was them against me. And the majority rules.

The rule of thumb was their falseness. And the shared pleasure of rubbing it in my face.

Which is ironic, considering that I was the falsest of them all!

“Gravy!” My mom offered proudly, with lips ridiculously pursed.

“Absolutely!” My sister, Sonja, rejoiced and sighed blissfully as she watched the brown lake spread across her plate.

All this fakery and theatrics was, of course, staged for my benefit – to deliver a clear message which said: “We are happy and have no problems, we get along, unlike you; you’re the one with the problem.”

But this time was different. I couldn’t do my part.

My grumpy remarks were mysteriously lost, and the familiar dinner playscript was suddenly scrambled in my head and slipping through my fingers. How do you talk? How do people talk? was all that burned through my brain. I noticed a slight shiver in my hand, too, when I lifted my glass of milk. I drank quickly and returned the glass to the table, then turned to gaze out the window. Is this how people hold their elbows and shoulders? I wondered. I felt a tiny flutter in my cheeks, which made me worry that they might’ve noticed something. That little flutter in my cheeks was in perfect sync with all the candles in the neighboring windows.

In all those windows.

***

A door had opened inside my brain. Another one had closed. There was no turning back now; the path was gone, and the bridge had been blown up.

            Suddenly, I seemed to remember everything that had happened to me in my life. All of it; old, buried images reaching as far back in time as I could think, old childhood things. I seemed to be able to dig up any old memory if I really wanted to. It was almost like my brain had opened like an encyclopedia, and now it lay wide open before me, with all the pages accessible. All I needed to do was flip through them.

I once explained this phenomenon to a psychiatrist in this way:

“Imagine you’re a tree. A big, leafy tree with a big, wide trunk. And you’re inside it. Well, where would you be in there? Probably somewhere in the center of it, right? You’d be in the middle, at the trunk, looking out, and your arms would be the branches spreading out from you, from your center, with all those leaves covering the branches, reaching out to your edges…

“But that’s not where I was. I wasn’t in the middle anymore. I was somewhere at the very edge of the tree, by one of those leaves where the tree ends. And from there, that viewpoint, I looked back at the tree, and the rest of the leaves, and the branches, and the trunk in the middle. I saw everything. I could see in every direction, near and far, my eyes could penetrate every fiber and cell of the leaf, and then move back and see the wholeness, the trunk, and the branches. I don’t know how it was possible, but that’s where I had landed. Everything was open for me.”

At the same time that I’d gained this terrifying perspective, I’d lost myself and my ability to function in the world. All those thoughts, all that knowledge, were too much at once, and I was lost inside of it. I didn’t know how to be anymore; I didn’t even know how to think.

At night, when I lay in bed, I dipped into this knowledge. I let the memories come, horrible snippets of life, inevitable, shocking images. I deliberately let them hammer me; I forced myself to look at them; I encouraged them. And as they dropped their long shadows over me, I took a mad dive and fell into them in a free fall through my mind. And as I fell, I felt some mental barrier in me break. But I let it break. I felt it needed to break.

I wanted it shattered, like I wanted the past ten years of my life shattered.

I saw the woods from my childhood, the terrible woods. I saw images of ghostly tree trunks rising up toward the white sky. And there was a strange sadness looming around me, somewhere between the spruces. The forest flowers seemed so melancholy – why? – hanging their heads in grief. And why was the smell of death everywhere? Like it was playing hide and seek with me? And why was I so lost and helpless in those woods, and why did my chest feel so hollow and my arms so heavy, and why was my mom’s shadow hanging over everything?

I saw images of Maya, the girl who bullied me at school. She was circling the schoolyard with determination, like someone on a mission. Her face was made of steel; it had no mercy.

I saw the red brick wall that covered the back of the schoolyard. There it stood, immovable and severe, like a cruel schoolmaster – an awful backdrop to a dark play. It also had no mercy.

She wrote my name on it! I suddenly remembered. With mocking words. She wrote shameful things about me on the red brick wall with snow and asked everyone to join her. And there was all this commotion and laughter going on at the foot of the red brick wall, all those laughing children writing mean words with snow…and her face was so delighted…I never saw such delight before…But then, when I went closer to look at the words, they covered them up, and all that was left was “Lisa is…”; and the rest of the letters were smeared in snow.

I remembered these things in a detached and clinical way. The images came and went, like lone planets in outer space. I remembered the feelings attached to the moments, but in a scientific way, as mere facts, cold and rational, while I, myself, was removed from them, as I was removed from all feeling. I watched a character, who happened to be me, like an insect under a magnifying glass, remembering her – me – as someone who once felt, and felt terribly. I knew I needed to become that girl again, but I didn’t know how. I only knew that she was in there, trapped inside me, and that she’d been sleeping for years in a white ocean of forgetfulness and lies. I knew that she – that I – had to wake up, because I was lying asleep in the dense sand at the bottom of the ocean, and that somehow, I needed to swim all the way back up to the gleaming surface.

But the light up there was so blindingly white.

***

It took me a while to find that special spot.

It had to be far enough from the road, so no one could hear me, because what if they did, and came to see who was making all that ruckus? Or God forbid, called the police? Next thing you know, I’d be in the newspapers: Girl found screaming in the woods.

I kept hiking deeper in, over rocks and logs. My tennis shoes sank into the soft green mosses, and here and there, dried-up branches grabbed hold of my jacket as I pressed through the spruces. But I kept moving deeper into the woods, because I wanted the wilderness, nothing but quiet and isolation. It had to be that far off in the woods for me to do what I needed to do.

It had to be taken to the wilderness, with no witnesses around.

Finally, I arrived at an area on top of a hill that looked right: It was a moss-covered plateau that seemed suitable to sit down on. I scanned around me and observed in the distance a slice of a blue bay glimmering between the trees – and houses! There were rooftops far off on the opposite shore, peeking out from the midst of spruces. Water carries sound, I thought, but then I decided it was the best I could do after all, so I sat down and watched the rooftops disappear behind the curtain of trees.

This scream had been sleeping inside me for a while now; maybe months. It needed to come out. It was sitting like a massive boulder on top of my chest.

So, I tried.

But as soon as I began, immediately, like in reflex, a pair of invisible, intruding bug eyes appeared inside my mind. First one pair, then another, then a hundred, watching with careful attentiveness – me! Then the talk was back – the constant talk, a swarm of opinions bouncing around in my head, like an army of people crowding in there, each of them giving their own individual viewpoint, worrying about this and that:

What about those rooftops in the distance? What if someone is out here in the woods? You don’t know, you don’t know. Don’t you look ridiculous sitting there on the ground, trying to scream? What are you doing? Look at your face. Aren’t you ashamed? Is this an act? Who’s your audience? Where are they? Are they over there, where the spruces form an arch? Are they the people from your school watching you? Your ex-friends? What do you think they’re thinking of you now? What do you think they’d say if they saw you now?

Just noise. Meaningless rattle and nonsense coming from a no-man’s-land where right or wrong, good or bad, no longer existed. Instead, everything had been turned into a muddy soup, made out of a buzz of random opinions that I had learned to live by.

It was the mask talking.

But now, as I tried to take it off, I realized that behind it, another mask hid, and if I tried to rip that one off too, it only revealed another, and another, and another…

It was payback time.

I was reminded of the day in the school yard when I first created the mask.

ON PURPOSE.

I did it on purpose. Not “subconsciously” like one of my psychiatrists once tried to suggest.

No, I knew exactly what I was doing.

I was eight years old.

And when I did it, I knew what it meant. I knew I was purposely killing the person that I was.

I made a deal with the devil.

But now it was time for me to reap what I’d sown. Now, all that was left of that deal was an empty mask that had been created for other people’s sake. There was no me anymore, only someone made for other people. It was the other people who blew life into me now, like air into an empty paper bag. They were the ones who dictated my behavior now. If they smiled, I smiled. If they were sad, I was sad. If they were mad, I was mad. Whatever they needed, I served it to them on a silver platter, in any form the order came.

I’d arrived at the end of my road.

I screamed, I squealed, I cried, I whined, there on the forest floor, desperately trying to grab hold of anything real, some form of self that was still there, somewhere beyond all those eyes. It was like being in front of a mirror and trying to find myself in it, but the person in the mirror was just an image of a girl, who was observed by another girl, in another mirror, who in turn was observed by yet another girl, in another mirror, followed by another, and another. It was like there was an endless row of mirrors inside me, mirrors within mirrors, all looking into each other, creating a never-ending row of girls, looking at themselves through millions of mirrors, leading into infinity. And no matter how much I screamed, I could never reach the anguish inside me; there was no outlet for it, and no relief, because of all those eyes in all those mirrors!

Only the image of me was left.

And the image was empty of feeling. A cold consciousness occupied it. A pair of eyes that constantly observed and analyzed, asking what I looked like now, and what feelings my expression might convey.

Except that there was no feeling, just the anguish of not feeling anything, the worst anguish possible. A pain without pain!

All I could do was suffer and burn in it, because I couldn’t reach myself anymore, and I couldn’t get out of it.

I understood that I had entered hell.

I understood this very clearly.

But there was no way for me to express it or tell anyone about it. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. But there it was, nevertheless. And I squirmed in pain that wasn’t pain inside a maze of mirrors on the forest floor, looking at myself while doing it.

And somewhere inside me, someone was laughing at the scene.

I reached into my bag and took out my makeup pouch. I dug out a small box of compact powder and opened it, staring at the tiny mirror inside, still hoping to find something real in it.

Two brown eyes with pin-sized pupils stared back at me, with a terrifying, blank expression in them. They reminded me of snake eyes.

Startled, I put the mirror away.

Then I just lay on the mosses, with a dying scream scrambling in my throat, while also floating next to myself, and observing myself from the outside, wondering if it would fit the performance to scream louder, but also realizing that it was a messed-up thought.

What should I do now? I asked myself.

What do you do when you’re alive, but dead, lying buried on the forest floor?

I began to choke myself, to at least feel something. At least I felt my fingers press against my throat.

And then finally, I just let go. My eyes froze on a single point in the sky, where slow afternoon clouds came and went. I understood that there was no use to any of it. There was nothing for me to find here. I was lost in a maze of mirrors.

The thought hit me: If suddenly a mushroom cloud rose above the treetops, even then I wouldn’t be able to escape those eyes and mirrors. Not even a nuclear bomb would be able to shock me back to life.

My only worry at the time of death would be what my face looked like right then.