The Monster in the Mirror

Turn's out, it's just me

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One of the things I love most about myself is also one of the ugliest parts of my personality (we love a contradiction!). Back in college, in the same night, my roommates told me I would be the most likely to punch someone in the face in a bar and that I was the most passionate person they knew… to the point that I saw the entire world in white and black.

They were not wrong. Almost fifteen years later they’re still not wrong.

In reflecting on this dichotomy—because who doesn’t love an existential spiral—it occurred to me that I generally think I am a good person, but there are most certainly things about me that are not good. Moments I’m not proud of. In fact, I think most humans think they are good people. But are they really? We all contain multitudes and high opinions of ourselves.

Last month when a woman was dragged out of an Idaho town hall for peacefully protesting (the horror!) she was manhandled and dragged out of the hall. Watching the footage, my stomach twisted in the worst of ways. Would I have been brave enough to stand up to those men? To the speaker on stage calling her a “little girl”?

Are the people who stood by and did nothing, even though they vehemently disagreed with what was happening, bad people? I don’t think so, but I do think the situation highlights an ugly side of their character.

I’d like to think I would have spoken up. My moral compass (black and white, per above) has little wiggle room for gray. I recognize this is not always a good thing—it can make me inflexible, judgmental, downright unbearable in a debate—but in this instance, I’d argue it’s the heart that counts.

And yet… my deep-seated people-pleasing tendencies would be screaming at me to stay in my goddamn seat. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make waves. (Why are there so many water idioms for this?)

Still, I know there’s a part of me—the part that would absolutely throw a punch in a bar—that would feel compelled to do something. The urge to defend, defend, defend is too strong.

I blame—and thank— my mother for this. When my sisters and I came home from school upset with our friends, she’d casually offer to hit them in the face with a shovel. (L—thanks, Mom! Everyone else—she never did! Promise!).

Maybe it comes down to a simple truth: I don’t trust my voice to defend… but apparently I trust my fists. Which is… concerning. Especially considering I’m a petite thing who would, undoubtedly, be inviting reciprocation. But maybe it’s the rage—this deep, simmering thing in my chest that fights to get out.

Despite this entire exercise in self-reflection, I still don’t know what I would do. But I know what I’d want to do. And maybe recognizing that is the first step in actually doing it.

And so, we’re here… trying to reconcile the ugliest parts of myself. The monster in the mirror bares its teeth when I refuse to back down in an argument. It curls its claws when I tell myself I'm a terrible person for making a mistake. It wears my own face when I try to control the uncontrollable.

“My personal beasties are ugly and ridiculous and they weigh me down and are exhausting to carry around. Sometimes it feels like they are larger than I am. They are destructive and baffling and ungainly. And yet. And yet, there is something wonderful in embracing the peculiar and extraordinary monsters that make us unique. There is joy in accepting the curious and erratic beasts that force us to see the world in new ways. And there is an uncanny sort of fellowship that comes when you recognize the beasties that other people carry with them and the battles we are all fighting even when they seem invisible to the rest of the world. We all have these monsters, I suspect, although they come from different places and have different names and causes.” ― Jenny Lawson, Broken (in the best way possible)

Viewing the world in black and white

This creature prefers the sharp edges of absolutes. My inability (or outright refusal) to acknowledge the gray area in life makes me incredibly unfun to debate. I don’t always realize I’m doing it—it’s a knee-jerk reaction. And yet, it prevents me from engaging in potentially productive, nuanced conversations.

My husband loves to rag on me for this. He swears I’m going to stop being invited to family functions. (Unlikely. They’ll just muzzle me.)

I kid, but it’s happened. I’ve walked into a room mid-[insert political topic of choice], only for the conversation to screech to a halt before everyone conveniently remembers they have somewhere else to be.

My little monster really knows how to clear a room.

This kind of black-and-white thinking isn’t just outward—it seeps into how I see myself.

If I make a mistake? If I hurt someone? If I get a rejection? My brain doesn’t process it as a singular event. It catastrophizes. My wee monster begins an incessant lecture. I don’t just feel bad—I spiral into I am a terrible person or I am an absolute failure. Objectively not true. But my brain struggles to hold two realities at once.

“Becoming your own friend means taking care of yourself the way you would someone that you love. And that’s hard. But it is necessary.” ― Jenny Lawson, Broken (in the best way possible)

On the flip side, this very same personality trait makes me the most enthusiastic cheerleader for everything I love. If I have even one glass of wine and you ask me for a book recommendation, I will wax poetic about my latest read, even if it was… a solid three stars. My brain doesn’t remember it was a three-star read. My brain filed it away as binary: LOVE IT or HATE IT.

Friends and family alike can attest, I will be so annoying about the things I love. I will preach. I will evangelize. You will regret asking.

Villain in someone else's story

There are three times in my life where I made myself physically ill trying to do the “right” thing—where I bent myself into knots trying to hurt no one and ended up sacrificing my own needs.

The first? Not breaking up with my first real boyfriend. He was wonderful. My family adored him. My extended family adored him. They still call him Sunshine. And I? I waffled. I don’t even remember why I wanted out. I just knew I did.

But I couldn’t do it. Think of the sheer amount of people I’d hurt! The result? I vomited every day until I finally ended it. Cried the whole time. Hated every second of hurting him. But I simply could not take the nausea for a single day more.

The second? Choosing a blocking group my freshman year of college. I lived with four other women, one of whom is still my best friend. These women thought we would be rooming together for the next three years, forming a group with a few other girls downstairs. The problem? I felt like an outsider in this group, my friends were doing their own thing, and I desperately wanted to share the next three years with them rather share a perpetually dirty common room… but I was so afraid of telling these girls no. I wanted out. But I was terrified of saying no.

I agonized. I drove my best friend insane. And then my mom—who had apparently had enough—called to tell me: “Sometimes, you just have to be the bitch if you ever want to be happy.”

So I did it. And it fractured whatever fragile friendship had existed between my freshman roommates. But it also led to three of the best years of my life.

The last? I’ve written about it before (you can read about it here), but it was the day I decided to give my relationship with my ex another chance. I was afraid of hurting people more than I already had. It felt like penance to try.

But the entire drive back to the city—alone—I thought about crashing my car. It would be easier than facing the mess I’d made.

“Forgive yourself. For being broken. For being you. For thinking those are things that you need forgiveness for.” ― Jenny Lawson, Broken (in the best way possible)

I hurt people knowingly. I was the villain.

And yet, in choosing myself, in being selfish, I claimed my own happiness.

The furry creature that stares back at me every morning? Well, she’s had to reconcile that happiness doesn’t come clean. It comes with ghosts.

Need for control

I’ve been called bossy before. And intimidating. Neither are compliments, but they do imply a certain confidence in my own thinking. I like to have a plan. I like to know where things are going. And if I don’t? My brain will try to brute-force certainty into existence.

Still, my need for control isn’t about confidence—it’s about fear.

Fear of the what ifs. What if everything falls apart? What if the worst-case scenario happens? What if, what if, what if?

My brain does not like open-ended questions. It does not like ambiguity. It prefers neat, predictable trajectories where I can map out every possible pitfall, where I can calculate the risks, where I can hedge against disaster before it even thinks about knocking. I want the safety of knowing how things will unfold, and when I don’t have that, I scramble to manufacture it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve already been through a few roller coasters. Maybe it’s because I know how quickly things can spiral when you don’t have control. My first panic attack happened in October of 2020. I collapsed in my kitchen, knees curled up to my chest, and tried to breathe through the intense pressure in my chest. My therapist told me that these things happen with increased stress (obviously…) and that the three most stressful things in life are divorce, death, and moving. Welp. 3/3 there. Miscarriage in early 2019, death, check. Divorce in 2019, check. Selling apartment and moving to France, check!

All this huge life stress, but the thing that broke me was… paperwork. It was over a vet appointment. Over a piece of paper that determined whether Sophie could move to France with us. She’s an American Staffordshire Terrier (a type of pitbull, if you will), but France considers the breed a dangerous breed and thus will not allow the Sophie-types into the country.

This dog, I kid you not, should be the PR representatives for pitbulls. She’s incredible. Beyond well-behaved, and puts every other family dog to shame (including my parents designer terrorist—sorry, Willow, still love you). She sat with me for every day I cried through my miscarriage. After my surgery, she slowed her walking pace to glacial speed so she could stand by my side in the NYC streets.

And yet… she might not have been able to go to France with us. [Spoiler alert: she came to France, she had a ball].

That feeling—of everything slipping through my fingers, of watching something unravel while being powerless to stop it—is unbearable. I’ve learned that if I can just plan for everything, maybe I can steer myself clear of disaster.

The problem, of course, is that life doesn’t work like that. Other people don’t work like that.

I have tried, many times, to control the narrative. I have tried to preempt pain by being five steps ahead. I have tried to make decisions for other people—not maliciously, but out of a misguided belief that I knew what was best. And I have learned, painfully, that control is a slippery thing.

You can’t control how people feel. You can’t control how they react. The monster hates that. It wants the script, the guarantees, the certainty. But people don’t come with instruction manuals. You can’t control the messy, unpredictable nature of being human. You can only control yourself—and even that, sometimes, is a losing battle.

I am trying—trying—to loosen my grip. To allow uncertainty. To sit in discomfort. To acknowledge that not knowing is not the same as failure.

But sheesh, it’s hard.

Final thoughts

Maybe the real monster in the mirror isn’t a villain. Maybe it’s just a person—trying to be good, failing sometimes, and hoping that still counts for something.

“It’s weird because we often try to present our fake, shiny, happy selves to others and make sure we’re not wearing too-obvious pajamas at the grocery store, but really, who wants to see that level of fraud? No one. What we really want is to know we’re not alone in our terribleness. We want to appreciate the failure that makes us perfectly us and wonderfully relatable to every other person out there who is also pretending that they have their shit together and didn’t just eat that onion ring that fell on the floor. Human foibles are what make us us, and the art of mortification is what brings us all together.” ― Jenny Lawson, Broken (in the best way possible)

Because isn’t that what we’re all doing? Carrying our contradictions, our regrets, our sharp edges and soft spots, and hoping that, in the end, they balance out?

I’ve spent years wrestling with the worst parts of myself—my inflexibility, my people-pleasing, my need for control, my tendency to see the world in absolutes. I’ve hurt people by trying too hard to be good, and I’ve hurt people by choosing myself instead.

But maybe morality isn’t a scoreboard. Maybe being a good person isn’t about never failing—it’s about what you do next. It’s about recognizing the moments where you weren’t kind enough, or brave enough, or honest enough, and choosing to do better.

The hardest part of facing the monster in the mirror is realizing it’s just you. No claws, no fangs—just flawed, complicated, trying. But maybe that’s also the best part. Because if I’m the monster, then I’m also the one who gets to rewrite the story.

“What we do with them makes a difference. And, whenever I can, I take mine out in the sun and try to appreciate that the flowers it rips up from the garden can sometimes be just as lovely when stuck in the teeth of its terrible mouth. Embrace your beasties. Love your awkwardness. Enjoy yourself. Celebrate the bizarreness that is you because, I assure you, you are more wondrous than you can possibly imagine … monsters and all” ― Jenny Lawson, Broken (in the best way possible)

Book and wine pairing (& essay?)

Serendipitously, amazingly, perfectly I read Broken (in the best way possible) by Jenny Lawson after writing this essay. The themes! The similarities! Her words! So of course, they needed to be sprinkled throughout for you to enjoy them, too.

Jenny Lawson, refreshingly weird and wickedly funny, humanizes her experience with depression and anxiety in her essay collection, Broken. I knew none of this. Two years ago a friend recommended it to me because he loved Jenny’s voice. I let it wallow on my TBR for ages because I wasn’t sure I was into essays. Then, last week, I read Kelly Eden’s article Is AI Making Writers Obsolete? TLDR: no, not yet—as long as writers stay weird. Mmmkay, love this sentiment. She even references Lawson’s ingenuity. So of course I finally had to pick it up.

This book is fun and weird and funny and human. I laughed out loud when she talks about the possibility of contracting rabies without knowing because bats bites are so small, we may no even know we’ve been bitten which she devolves into a fetish. Frankly, it reminded me of all the women obsessed with the batboys in the ACOTAR series. Iykyk. (I do really enjoy these books, but the book boyfriend obsession with Rhysand, Cassian, and Azriel is next level. Read at your own risk, but also have fun).

It creates space for connection and being seen, you could never be lonely battling depression or anxiety when you know greats out there like Lawson are sharing it with the world. This book is meant for laughter, for happiness, for sitting around a fire swapping our most bizarre stories. Ideally, with a glass of something equally effervescent and delightfully unhinged.

Maybe pick up a pét-nat! (short for pétillant-naturel). It’s funky, unpredictable, slightly chaotic (in the best way possible), and always a little different—just like Lawson’s humor. A sparkling Gamay pét-nat would be perfect. It’s juicy, a little wild, and has that unfiltered, joyful edge. Try Las Jaras' Sparkling Gamay for a fizzy, vibrant pairing.

Writing Update

“I’m the problem it’s me. At tea time, everybody agrees.” Taylor Swift’s AntiHero pretty much sums up my relationship with writing right now.

The wonderful

Jessica Sorentino

(book marketer extraordinaire) introduced me to

Alyssa Matesic

at

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to review my manuscript… I was feeling overwhelmed and a little lost. The revise and resubmit is great news and I don’t want to ruin that opportunity. So… we shall see!

I know writers have mixed feelings about hiring editors, but honestly, if I want to take my dream of getting published seriously, I have to take myself seriously. I know that I’m a good writer, I know I have an amazing story… but it also means know that I am absolutely terrible with editing my own work. I just can’t see the forest through the trees.

So Susie Sweetheart is napping for now. So is McMurder. And I’m still working on that old fantasy manuscript and having a total blast getting into the playlists I made years ago, tweaking character names, motivations, magics. Maybe this is the fun I needed.

At the very least, I’m still writing. I’m still doing what I love. Which means I’m still fighting.

“I cry a lot but I am so productive. It’s an art.” — I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, Taylor Swift (and me, probably)

What I’ve been enjoying recently

Othello on Broadway with Denzel Washington & Jake Gyllenhaal - holy guacamole, so good. I wish I had reread the book before going so I could have picked up on more of Shakespeare’s genius… but even then, there were times I laughed out loud. And frankly, was so impressed with their performances. If you have the opportunity to see it, run don’t walk.

The Kindred’s Curse Saga by Penn Cole - yes, I’m still reading these. I needed my brain to shut off for a few days… which turned into a few sleepless nights that I read my kindle under the covers. I do not in good conscience recommend these books but I have now waited roughly 1500 pages between 3 books for some kind of **action** (wink). Still no. Someone needs to edit these down. Way down. And give the romantasy girlies what they want. AT LEAST IN BOOK TWO. Like I said, HOSTAGE SITUATION.

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall - Okay, really excited for this one! There has been a lot of hype for this book, some already calling it book of the year (feels premature in March, but alas, I don’t make the rules), but also because

Jessica Sorentino

have a little surprise coming that may or may not have to do with this book. I’m so excited!

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - For one of my book clubs! Stay tuned :) I am sure I will have plenty to say about this upon reading it.

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Please consider clicking the little heart on this essay—your engagement helps more than you think! I’d love to hear from you if this essay made you ~feel~ something, have read a book I recommended, or think I’m wildly off about my wine pairings.

xx,
bb