Ella Wilcox on Lucy Grealy's "Mirrorings"

While reading this personal essay, I was initially captivated by the fact that this woman avoided her own reflection for an entire year. You do not know why this is. It is intriguing and now you are committed.

The part where she describes her chemotherapy is the part that I felt she made the best connection to the reader, because everyone is affected by cancer. Personally you may not be affected by cancer but chances are, you know someone with cancer. The detail that she put into describing her symptoms was incredible. It made me experience what she was experiencing.

I found it inspiring that in order to cope with being bullied and being an outcast at school, she found her savior in being around horses. I know from personal experience that being around horses makes you feel graceful and you can even find beauty in yourself. They are kind creatures and as cheesy as it sounds, they accept you for who you are. They don’t care what you look like they only care about how you make them feel. If you are kind to them they will return the same kindness. This is not always the same case with humans.

I really enjoyed the parts of the essay where she talked about how she felt lucky to know the real truth about life, while everyone else walked around thinking that they have things so bad. Through this, it was clear that she started to count her own blessings instead of those of other people. Although, throughout the entire essay she explains that she wasn’t always this way. She was constantly teased and bullied in school and even later on in her work place. It was a bit heartbreaking to know that this woman had to go through all these experiences and that she couldn’t even say she was depressed because all she felt was ugly. That was the only sensation she knew.

A quote from the essay that I thought really summed up her feelings was;

“On one level I understood that the image of my face was merely that, an image, a surface that was not directly related to any true, deep definition of the self. But I also knew that it is only through appearance that we experience and make decisions about the everyday world, and I was not always able to gather the strength to prefer the deeper world to the shallow one.”

This quote really expresses that even though she found a deeper meaning to life and that she was lucky to have discovered it, it was sometimes really exhausting to keep that up. She would get tired of keeping it up and just want to “fit in” for a change.

Towards the end of the essay, there was a sense that she was starting to become more comfortable being who she was. She even had a sense of humor about all the surgeries that she had to endure. “The one good thing about a tissue expander is that you look so bad with it in that no matter what you looked like once it was finally removed, your face has to look better.”

I believe that this essay did impact the way I look at creative nonfiction writing a and just writing in general. I particularly liked the way she described things that others may experience what she experienced. I hope to be able to achieve that one-day.