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Author’s Note:
I have spent most of my life circling mirrors of one kind or another.
The mirror of my work, where relevance depends on constant learning and the refusal to stand still. The mirror of stability, where every decision is measured against the fragile balance of economic and personal security. And the mirror of conscience, where I turn over my actions again and again, asking if they were good—not simply effective, but good.
But I’d be lying if I said I circled these mirrors with any real gentleness. I didn’t approach them to see myself clearly. I approached them like battle stations. Because for a long time, I would’ve rather died on my grind than let anyone see me fall. I’ve sanded myself down into something palatable—not for health, not for peace, but so no one would get uncomfortable and start asking if I was okay.
And the worst part? It worked. Every time.
Another truth? Most people are too busy performing their own survival to notice yours. They don’t see your cracks. They see your costume.
Regardless, what I’ve learned is that mirrors are never neutral because we always look at them from our own perspective. They can guide, or they can punish. They can help us remember our worth, or convince us that worth is always somewhere just beyond reach.
This essay is not a rejection of growth; it is a meditation on why we grow, and what it costs when growth is fueled by shame instead of care. It is a reminder that stability is not the absence of movement, but the presence of roots. That relevance comes not from frantic reinvention, but from integrity.
And that goodness is not proven by performance, but lived through wholeness.
~Dom
Before the world awoke, there was only light and shadow—and among the kami, none shone brighter than Amaterasu, the sun goddess of Shinto myth. She illuminated the heavens and the earth, her radiance a gentle constant, sustaining all things without asking to be seen.
But not all light is met with gratitude.
Amaterasu’s brother, Susanoo, the storm god, driven by fury and chaos, rampaged through the celestial realm. His defilement of her sacred spaces, his careless violence, culminated in the destruction of her weaving hall and the death of her handmaiden. It was not just the act—it was the betrayal. The desecration of what was meaningful. The disregard for what was sacred. The pain was too much.
And so she hid.
Amaterasu withdrew into a cave, taking her light with her. The world, once vibrant, fell into a long and lifeless dusk. Crops failed. Spirits faded. Gods and mortals alike wandered in growing darkness, their eyes adjusting to a world without warmth. No flame could mimic her. No decree could summon her. Her retreat was not anger—it was protection. It was grief. It was the knowledge that even divinity has a limit.
But the world could not bear her absence.
The kami, desperate to restore balance, gathered outside the sealed cave and devised a plan not of force, but of wonder. They brought music. They brought laughter. And then they brought a mirror.
It was not a weapon, but an invitation.
When the goddess, curious, peeked out to see what could possibly stir joy in such a dim world, she caught sight of the mirror. But what she saw was not merely a reflection. She saw herself—untamed, luminous, regal. Not broken. Not shamed. Not diminished.
In that moment, she remembered. Amaterasu stepped out of the cave. And with her, the world exhaled.
Her return was not an act of forgiveness for those who wounded her, nor an apology for her absence. It was a return to self—a reclamation. The light had not gone out. It had simply gone within.
This story is not just myth. It is metaphor. It’s the story of anyone who has stepped back from the world, not to be dramatic, but to survive. It is for those who have stared into mirrors and only seen distortion—and for those who, one day, will remember who they are.
This is not a lesson in obedience or endurance. It is a truth:
The mirror is only useful if it helps you remember your radiance—not replace it.
The Mirror Isn’t Neutral
In our lives today, we are surrounded by mirrors, but few of them are kind.
We are exposed to an unrelenting stream of perfected images—of beauty, intellect, lifestyle, productivity, romance, and moral virtue. Social platforms have become shrines to selective distortion, showing us not how people are, but how they wish to be perceived. Algorithms amplify extremes, and comparison has become our daily ritual. Even those who excel—who lead, who achieve, who create—are left staring at their own reflection, haunted not by failure, but by the imagined perfection they have yet to reach.
This is the tyranny of exposure: the idea that growth must always be visible, measurable, and relentless. It is not enough to be healthy; you must be sculpted. It is not enough to be stable; you must be rising. Your home must be minimalist and immaculate. Your relationship must be public and poetic. Your mind must be healed. Your life must be aspirational.
And so, we edit.
We audit our speech, our posture, our ambitions. We recite therapy language in conflict. We journal like unpaid interns of our own trauma. We vacuum the living room before crying on the kitchen floor. We track sleep, and macros, and screen time, not to feel better, but to feel in control of what is being watched.
But here is the quiet crisis: even when we are the only ones watching, we feel the pressure to perform.
The mirror is not neutral. Its gaze is shaped by what we believe we should be. And when our belief is poisoned—by shame, by culture, by cruelty… the mirror reflects a target, not a truth.
This is not a rejection of growth. But it is a reckoning with the why of it. Because not all self-improvement is born from care. Some of it grows from self-contempt, wearing the dress of discipline. Some of it is the slow ritual of erasing what is wild and vital, just to match a reflection we never agreed to.
To see clearly, we must begin with a different question: Do I want to grow because I value myself—or because I don’t?
When Growth Becomes Proof of Failure
Sometimes, you improve, not because you believe you’re worth the effort, but because somewhere deep down, we fear you’re only valuable if you do.
At first, it looks like motivation. Like clarity. A commitment to being better. But if you sit with it long enough, you start to realize: it’s not always growth. Sometimes it’s penance. A ritual of self-correction for crimes no one else is prosecuting.
Healing becomes performance. Progress becomes currency. And your reflection turns into a scoreboard.
It wasn’t that you wanted to become yourself—it’s that you couldn’t stand being that you. Not as you were. Not with what you carried. Not under the eyes you imagined watching, even when you were alone.
This is the quiet tragedy of shame-fueled growth: it never actually lets you arrive. Every milestone just raises the standard. Every change becomes proof that you needed fixing in the first place. You become the person who always needs work.
And in the name of becoming better, you start saying less. Wanting less. Laughing less. You stop taking up space in ways that might be seen as too much. You call it self-awareness, but it’s often just self-shrinkage with better branding.
You apologize—not just for your mistakes, but for your existence. And you do it so fluently, so gracefully, that people don’t even notice. They call you wise. Grounded. Thoughtful. And maybe you are. But maybe you’re also tired. Tired of editing yourself into someone palatable. Tired of turning down your volume so others don’t flinch.
You don’t even know if you’re healing anymore. You just know you’re quieter. More “professional.” More “productive.”
But this kind of growth doesn’t build you. It buries you. It hides you behind layers of refinement, until even you start to forget what you looked like before all the edits.
And the hardest part? It works. People praise you for it. They thank you for being so easy to work with, so emotionally mature, so careful with your presence. And each compliment becomes a brick in the wall that now separates you from yourself.
When growth becomes proof of failure, it stops being love. It stops being care. It becomes punishment wrapped in self-help language. A form of exile disguised as evolution.
What you grow from should not be shame. What you grow into should still be you.
The Internal Voice: Steward or Censor?
We all have that voice in our heads—the one that notices, corrects, advises, warns. And when it’s healthy, it’s a kind of stewardship. A form of care. It guides us back to our values when we drift. It reminds us who we are when the world tries to tell us otherwise.
But that voice can shift. It can harden. And when it does, it stops guiding and starts policing. Instead of asking, “Is this who I want to be?” it starts whispering, “You’re still not enough.”
You begin to scan yourself like a security checkpoint, looking for smuggled flaws, concealed emotions, anything unpresentable. You filter your thoughts before you allow yourself to feel them. You pre-correct your reactions before they arrive. That voice stops being a steward and becomes a censor. It assumes the role of a quiet tyrant who knows all your weak spots.
It tells you joy must be earned. That love must be justified. That rest is only for the accomplished. It teaches you to delay celebration until you’re fixed—and you’re never quite fixed.
You don’t allow joy before you’re “done healing.” You don’t permit imperfection unless you’ve already apologized for it in advance. Every mistake feels like confirmation. Every success feels temporary.
This isn’t healing. It’s aestheticized penance. It’s self-help cosplay with a ‘live laugh love’ filter.
The irony is, growth of this sort becomes subtractive. You think you’re evolving, but you’re really just whittling. Carving away anything that might be criticized, misunderstood, or inconvenient.
But here’s the truth: You can edit yourself out of existence. Or you can tend yourself into strength.
The inner voice isn’t the enemy. But it must answer to love. If it cannot speak to you the way a good friend would—with honesty, yes, but also compassion—it is not truth.
It is trauma with a vocabulary. And it deserves to be rewritten.
On Being Worth the Work
Somewhere along the way, you have to ask the question no one teaches you to ask: What if I’m already enough to be worth the effort?
Not once I’ve healed. Not once I’ve achieved. Not once I’ve purged every impulsive thought or stitched up every visible scar. Just… as I am. Human. Complex. In progress. That doesn’t mean growth isn’t important, but it reframes the starting point. Growth isn’t what makes you valuable. Growth is what becomes possible once you know you already are.
That shift changes everything. Because growth, when rooted in care, isn’t a form of erasure; it’s a form of honor. A way of saying, “You matter enough to be tended to. You matter enough to be carried forward.” You don’t renovate a house you hate. You don’t water a plant you’ve already given up on. You tend to what you love. Or at the very least, what you believe is worth preserving.
When you believe you’re unworthy, healing becomes a punishment you carry out on yourself. Each step forward is proof that the version of you before was unacceptable. But when you begin from the assumption of worth, healing becomes stewardship, rather than correction. Development becomes an act of devotion—not the kind that demands perfection, but the kind that sees possibility and chooses to nurture it.
It’s the difference between correcting yourself and cultivating yourself. Between trying to survive by disappearing, and trying to thrive by becoming more fully who you already are. Between trimming yourself down for acceptability and growing deeper roots for endurance.
Imagine the internal shift: from fixing a problem… to feeding a soul.
When you start from worth, you stop performing recovery for other people’s comfort. You stop negotiating your presence like it’s a luxury item. You stop delaying joy until you’ve hit an invisible benchmark. You begin to trust that presence doesn’t need to be polished to be powerful.
You don’t need to be perfect to be in process. You don’t need to be fixed to be loved. You just need to stop treating yourself like a walking construction site with no end date.
You need, simply, to begin from the truth: You are worth the work—not because you’ll become someone else, but because you are already someone who matters.
Integration Over Erasure
You don’t throw away a plant because a leaf wilts. You trim, you water, you adjust the light. You accept that living things bend and bruise, and you tend to them not because they are flawless, but because they are alive.
You don’t bulldoze a home because one room needs renovation. You patch the cracks, replace what’s broken, repaint what’s faded. And you do it because the home itself is worth saving—because beneath the wear, it holds history, shelter, meaning.
In the same way, you preserve what is true, even as you refine what no longer fits. You don’t burn down the whole of yourself because one part is struggling. You don’t discard your identity because one season of your life left scars. You honor the continuity of who you are.
Jung once said the self is not meant to be “fixed” but made whole. And wholeness is not the absence of flaw—it is the inclusion of all that has been rejected. It is stitching the wild, unruly, and unpolished parts of yourself back into the fabric, not tearing them out to maintain an image of purity.
Other traditions echo this truth. The Dao does not demand that every river follow the same course—it honors the winding, individual path as part of the Way itself. To live is not to conform to a single pattern, but to follow your current until it meets the sea. Integration means walking your own path, even when it meanders, rather than forcing yourself into someone else’s map.
The Japanese art of kintsugi offers another reminder. When a vessel shatters, it is not discarded. It is repaired with gold, the cracks illuminated rather than hidden. The break becomes part of its story, and the repair makes it more precious, not less. So too with us: our fractures are not disqualifications. They are the places where, if we let them, strength and beauty can enter.
Integration is not glamorous. It is slow work. Patient work. The work of gardeners and caretakers, not editors and executioners. It doesn’t ask you to erase yourself. It asks you to gather your pieces and say, this too belongs.
Reclaiming the Mirror
And so we return to the cave, to the moment when Amaterasu stepped out into the world again. The earth did not demand she shine differently. The gods did not hand her new garments or ask her to apologize. They simply held up a mirror, and she saw—clearly, fully—that the light had never left her.
This is the work we circle back to: not endless editing, not exile disguised as evolution, but remembering. Remembering that growth should not be penance. That the inner voice must serve as steward, not tyrant.
That worth is the starting point, not the prize at the end. That integration is what makes us whole.
The mirror is not the enemy. But it is dangerous if we look to it for permission to exist. Its truth is revealed only when we already know we are real. Only when we have claimed, with quiet certainty, that the person reflected back is worthy of care, worthy of presence, worthy of becoming.
The sunrise comes when you can look and say:
“I see the same face. And I don’t need to flinch at each flaw. That’s enough.”
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