The Girl Who Hid From Mirrors
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 Apologies to NM, with much affection., and for Junta, who would know.
Her name — well, not her name, not the one they gave her at the thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraiser where they snickered sotto voce about her trust fund like a debutante beheading — but the name she used in the small circles of the self-aware and socially anxious — was Fiona.
Fiona had red hair like a warning sign. Like an old God’s middle finger. It flamed around her face like a Roman candle going off in slow motion.
She painted large, frightening canvases.
Wrote poems so intimate you felt indecent reading them.
And she had money. Enough to never work. Enough to flee any room the moment someone looked too long. Or smiled too hard. Or asked her, gently, “What do you do?”
And that was the rub. Fiona didn’t want to be looked at.
She wanted to be seen — but appropriately.
With the right kind of respect, the kind you reserve for tragic statues, or rare birds, or the last cigarette in the pack.
And if you couldn’t manage that? She’d rather disappear. Into the garden. Into the bathtub. Into a painter’s smock so large it could qualify as an anti-espionage device.
The Childhood
They called her “the little actress” in Montessori.
She had a face like a spotlight and a father who weaponized it.
Daddy loved to show her off — sang her praises like a publicist, and ignored her terror like a drunk captain ignoring icebergs.
Smile, sweetheart. Show them your pretty poem. Look at all these people who adore you. Don’t cry, for Christ’s sake, you’re not even trying.
So she stopped trying. Stopped speaking.
Refused to open birthday cards. Refused to attend recitals. Refused to do anything that might result in a room full of eyes staring at her like she was a diagnosis they didn’t understand.
By fourteen, Fiona had turned avoidance into an Olympic sport.
She was charming at a distance, feral in person, and allergic to camera phones.
There was a now-famous Instagram post of her at a cousin’s wedding — eyes wide, mouth half-curled into a grimace — that a poet from Berlin later described as “the purest documentation of existential horror since Munch’s The Scream.”
The Symptoms
Fiona, an accomplished painter and poet, couldn’t go to art openings. Couldn’t do readings of her own work.
Couldn’t even walk past mirrors without feeling like her own reflection was judging her outfit, her posture, her authenticity.
It wasn’t vanity. It was viscerality.
The sensation of being looked at lit up her nervous system like a burglar alarm. Every eyeball was a predator. Every compliment, a possible trap.
She knew the term: Scopophobia.
She’d read the DSM cover to cover like a self-help book written by hostile bureaucrats.
She knew the spotlight effect, knew the neuroscience, could quote Gilovich and Gabor Maté in the same breath.
But it didn’t help. Knowing why the trap existed didn’t dismantle the wiring that made her jump when it snapped.
The Therapy
She found a therapist in Newton who had a doctorate, a nose ring, and a coffee mug that read “BEHOLD ME AT YOUR OWN RISK.” They sat in silence a lot.
Sometimes Fiona would cry, then apologize for crying, then panic that the therapist was watching her apologize for crying.
Once she asked if she could do the sessions behind a paper screen. The therapist didn’t blink. “Sure,” she said. “As long as you’re here.”
This, it turned out, was revolutionary.
The therapist used Internal Family Systems. Talked about the young part, the overperformer part, the avoidant part, the exile. Fiona hated it — until she didn’t. Until she realized the girl who froze when watched wasn’t crazy. She was just young. And scared. And brilliant. And tired of performing as someone who wasn’t terrified.
The Art
She started painting eyes. Hundreds of them.
In shades of blue so violent you couldn’t look at them for long. She painted them on canvas, on plates, on windows, on the backs of her hands. Each one a tiny exorcism. A reminder that she could create the gaze, too. She wasn’t just a hunted animal. She was also the hunter. The seer. The witness.
And one day — quietly, unceremoniously — she showed up to her own gallery opening.
In a velvet coat. With no makeup. And a nametag that said: “I am a little afraid. Say hi anyway.”
People did.
She didn’t die.
In fact, she laughed.
And somewhere deep inside the tangle of history and neural wiring, a terrified little girl unclenched her fists.
The official clinical notes from Fiona’s file would’ve said something like:
“Presenting concerns: social avoidance, severe self-consciousness, probable scopophobia, masking behaviors, and internalized shame schema rooted in developmental attachment trauma. High cognitive capacity, emotionally expressive in writing, guarded in speech. Avoidant but deeply relational. Artistic dissociation likely serves as a self-regulation strategy.”
But the therapist, the one with the doctoral degree and the punk-rock coffee mug, had a different summary.
“She’s terrified of being seen because it has always meant being used.”
The Therapeutic Middle: When Healing Feels Like Hell
Healing, contrary to popular TikTok aesthetics, is not a glow-up. It’s not a montage.
It’s not Fiona painting on a sun-drenched terrace while Lizzo plays in the background. Healing for Fiona looked like:
Coming to therapy half-dressed because her nervous system couldn’t handle “presenting herself”
Spending 35 minutes discussing whether the therapist’s raised eyebrow was curiosity or judgment
Dissociating during eye contact, then crying afterward because she couldn’t tell if it meant she was broken or just really, really lonely
There was a session where Fiona admitted that she had, for years, fantasized about being invisible. Not metaphorically. Literally. A cloak. A glitch. An absence. “Not being looked at,” she said, “would feel like love.”
The therapist didn’t rush in to correct her.
She just let the silence stretch out, soft and terrible. Eventually Fiona added, “But I guess that’s how I learned to stay safe. And maybe I’m tired of hiding from people who don’t even want to hurt me.”
That was the moment the therapist made a note: “Protective part is softening. Let’s meet the exile.”
The IFS Shift: Meeting the Parts
Using Internal Family Systems, Fiona began identifying parts she had long mistaken for her whole self. There was:
The Performer — the part that could light up a room, speak in sonnets, flirt with a wine glass and two sentences, and then cry for three days after
The Avoider — who knew every trick to exit a social interaction without seeming rude, from sudden migraines to scheduled “Zoom calls” that didn’t exist
The Exile — the small, sacred one, hidden for decades, who was humiliated when Daddy made her sing in front of drunken executives. Who had learned that being looked at means being evaluated and being evaluated always ends in being wrong
That exile had been frozen in a kind of developmental amber. Still afraid. Still ashamed. Still waiting for someone to look at her without demand.
This is the part that most people — therapists included — miss when treating scopophobia in neurodivergent folks. It’s not just about discomfort. It’s about the sacred wound of misattuned attention. It’s about never having been seen with safety and slowness.
Neurodivergence as a Wound and a Gift
It became increasingly clear that Fiona’s nervous system was neurodiverse — likely autistic, definitely ADHD, certainly sensory exquisita. She hadn’t been diagnosed as a child — redheaded girls with big vocabularies and artistic talent rarely were. Instead, she’d been labeled “dramatic,” “private,” and “intense.”
What she was, in fact, was brilliant and unscreened — a live wire in a rubber-glove world.
The fear of being looked at wasn’t irrational. It was based on a lifetime of being misread, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood.
Once the label was named (with care, not pathologizing), something shifted.
Fiona began to forgive herself. She stopped asking why she couldn’t “just be normal.” She started asking what environments, relationships, and rituals would help her feel safe enough to be real.
Where She Is Now (And Where She Isn’t)
Fiona hasn’t started giving TED Talks. She hasn’t become a social butterfly. She hasn’t done that thing where “formerly shy girl goes viral for her vulnerability” and then crashes six months later in a mess of cortisol and mascara.
But she’s done something better.
She’s let a few people look at her — friends, lovers, a new therapist in the Berkshires — without shrinking, flinching, or dissociating.
She’s written poems that use the word “I” without apology.
For the Eye That Didn’t Flinch
You looked
and nothing happened.
My skin did not catch fire.
My mouth did not vanish.
You did not inventory me like a priest
counting sins by collarbone.
You looked
like someone who had
once been looked at
and survived.
I almost asked you
to do it again.
Portrait with the Gaze Removed
In this painting
you can see everything but my face:
the shadow of my wrist,
the edge of my knee,
the place where grief
sits like a second rib.
I erased the eyes.
Mine and yours.
I wanted to make something beautiful
without being responsible
for how it was received.
Scopophobia Is a Type of Weather
I don’t fear people.
I fear forecast.
Will today be
casual glances with a breeze of disinterest,
or
the sudden storm of
being seen too closely
by someone whose eyes
don’t know how to whisper?
When I say
"Don’t look at me,"
what I mean is
"Please look at me,
but only the way rain
looks at windows—
with no agenda. Just falling."
Self-Portrait with Fog
There are women who look in mirrors
and see potential.
I see maintenance.
Correction.
A game of spot-the-difference
between how I felt this morning
and how I’m supposed to feel now.
But on some days—
with sleep still clinging to my jaw,
with no one in the room to hold the light—
I catch a glimpse
of someone I might someday love.
Even if she’s red-eyed.
Even if she’s me.
Poem for Hummingbird Hill
You didn’t flinch
when I came in half-invisible.
Didn’t fill the silence.
Didn’t ask me to be
anything but here.
You sat there like
a witness who wasn’t subpoenaed.
Present. Unafraid.
Sacred.
And maybe I started to believe
that not every eye
is a blade.
Some are
soft,
tired,
half-blind,
human.
Like mine.
She’s stopped using pseudonyms at gallery shows. She’s begun painting portraits. Not of eyes anymore — but of faces. Real, flawed, messy human faces. Witnessing each other.
And sometimes, when no one’s watching, she looks in the mirror and doesn’t wince.
She looks.
She breathes.
She remains.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.