I am fourteen years old when I learn about the “true mirror.” This is a mirror that reflects your image back to you—not reversed, the way you’re used to viewing it, but accurately. The way other people see you. The way you really are.

      I run back to my bedroom to create my own. I’ve been looking in regular mirrors my whole life, where the familiarity of the reflection, according to the article, blurs all flaws beyond notice. The only glimpses I’ve gotten of my true self have been in photographs, and those are always disappointing: my features warped by an odd angle, my mouth frozen on the cusp of a sneer or laugh.

       I grab a hand mirror and hold it up to my mirrored wardrobe, creating a ninety-degree angle. I put my cheek up to the wardrobe and tilt the hand mirror so I can view my face from the front.

        And in the vague, glittering triangle that these two mirrors create, I see the truth. My stomach turns hard and cold, like a seed left unplanted in midwinter. Because the face in the mirror is deformed. Clinically deformed: these exact words ripple through my brain.

       The photographs weren’t lying after all.

       I have known for a long time that symmetry means beauty. And at last I can see how asymmetrical my features truly are. Both eyes are hooded, but the right one seems to have absolutely no eyelid at all: there is only skin folding down onto the eyelashes, hanging like a tiny curtain. The length of my nose is curved to the left, but at the bulbous tip it abruptly changes direction, switching course to the right. My right nostril is elongated, stretched further across my cheek than the left one. As though I were once made of wet clay and someone, some cruel artist, put their finger on the midpoint of my right cheek and pulled. Seen from the front, my nose is a ) shape. A backwards C. A thick and ugly crescent moon.

       My lips are an old scar across my face: thin, pale, broken. They protrude foolishly, jutting out above an oddly short chin. My philtrum is also short. Why have I never noticed these things before? My hairline is far too low, creeping down to my eyebrows, giving me the look of a less-developed human. A prehistoric, hulking beast. 

       The right side of my Cupid’s Bow is raised more than the left, as though my mouth is frozen in the beginnings of a snarl. The tear troughs under my eyes are stark, as though the sadistic artist from before has wiped sleep-dirt out of my eyes too roughly and too many times.

       There is a taste in my mouth like the parched rind of a lemon, sucked empty of juice and color. My chest is a coiled knot of weeds.

       I stare at the true me—the me everyone sees, the me everyone has known all along—with horrified fascination. I tilt the hand mirror first one way and then the other. The whole time, my gaze hovers just out of reach. 

       One can never meet one’s eyes in a true mirror.

*

Just before ninth grade, I get bangs for the first time. It’s 2010, and side bangs are popular, but I go further than that: instead of having my side-swept bangs cover only the right side of my forehead, I style them longer, so that they drape further. So that they obscure most of my right eye. 

       In September, I return to school with the strange single wing of my bangs flapping over my right eye. I wander around the hallways with a near-total lack of depth perception—stretching my hand out for a locker a few inches out of reach, walking into the side of a door, nearly falling down a flight of stairs. As the weeks go on, I develop a habit of raising my chin to look at things. This enables me to see through both eyes again, but it also gives me the appearance of someone who is incredibly stuck-up. I try to force myself to keep my chin down, but then I start performing a little involuntary twitch of my head, in order to shake the bangs off my eye.

       Finally I lose patience and cut off my bangs at the roots. Within hours, they start growing back again, and I am left with a strange fuzz sprouting at my hairline. A hideous, bristling garden. I begin shaving it with my disposable pink razors, and this gives me razor burn on my forehead. Gingerly, I finger the raw, bumpy skin. I bite my lip—thin, dry, the anemic shade of scar tissue—and try not to cry.

*

In a notebook, I make lists of surgeries I will get in the future: Rhinoplasty. Blepharoplasty. Tear trough filler. Lip filler. I never will end up getting any of these things done, but at the time, I can’t imagine anything else ever being more important to me.   

*

I have heard the term body dysmorphia. But it will take me years to understand that it can also apply to the face. Even after I graduate high school and am scouted for modeling, even after my agency flies me across the country to do a campaign, even after I start dating and realizing that there are, in fact, men who will deign to touch me, the horror of viewing my face like that never quite goes away. It is buried inside my chest like a half-forgotten secret. Even today, I have to stop myself from looking at my face for too long in the mirror—not a true mirror, this time, just a regular one. Sometimes it feels like I could stand here for hours, staring into my own eyes, into the gaze I can only meet when I’m looking at the version of myself that is a lie.