In my experience, by far the hardest thing to learn are the unpleasant truths about myself. This is so even about those things that are glaringly obvious to everyone else.
But what I don’t know about myself has frightened me. I fear the lies I am capable of telling myself, the rationalizations I’m so good at developing to hide myself from myself.
There is one mirror I’ve found which gives me some kind of glimpse into my less than lovely self. But I don’t find it easy to look into, and I understand why the witch smashed the mirror rather than face the fact that she was not the most beautiful person in the palace.
The mirror is offered by Carl Jung, the contemporary of Freud:
What makes us most irritated, most annoyed, most angry about others can lead us to understand some parallel vulnerability in ourselves.
Frankly, I sometimes find it easier to get over my annoyance than to recognize that I might have in myself the seeds of the very thing that makes me so angry in others. I guess that’s a little like smashing the mirror?
