Mirror, mirror on the wall

What comes to your mind when you think of looking in the mirror?

A dear friend with whom I often share writing and I decided to work 10-minute free writes into our time together. We take turns suggesting prompts. It was my turn to provide the prompt today, and I chose a paragraph from Elizabeth Gilbert's CITY OF GIRLS describing how a character preens in front of the mirror. It was a humorous selection, but after I read it aloud, my friend and I both went to intense childhood experiences in our own writing. I recalled how I never saw my stepmother look into a mirror, the complete opposite of the character in Gilbert's novel, and I explored from there, thinking about her low self-esteem and its roots—powerful stuff about how our concepts of what beauty is shape our experiences. Mirrors are an excellent topic to dig into.