The bodies we inhabit and the lives those bodies carry on need not be perfect to suit us perfectly. And yet, so many people struggle against their own bodies, cruelly judging merit and, sadly, cruelly treating (withholding, carving, over-challenging or neglecting) their bodies.
Poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “I know of no women – virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate – whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves, – for whom the body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its desire, its so-called fidelity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes an ripening.”
Six months before Kjerstin Gruys‘ October 2011 wedding, she decided to live without mirrors… for a year. Her blog Mirror, Mirror… Off the Wall began as a way to document her no-mirrors project, and has since evolved into a place where she muses, rants, and reports on the colliding worlds of sociology, social psychology, contemporary feminism, body image, and beauty culture.
Where sociology, contemporary feminism, body image & beauty culture collide with everyday life.
Kjerstin writes in her new book, Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body by Not Looking at It for a Year, that she was “a body-image expert with a body-image problem.” In an interview for USA Today, she describes her year of avoiding seeing her own reflection in an effort to shift her thinking to reduce the impact of her appearance and align her values with her actions: in total, to find peace with her body.