Your energy mirror
There’s this framing I find helpful. Think about walking into a room full of faces, some you know, others unfamiliar to you. It could be a kind of social gathering. A party. Before you entered, the room was a certain way. What I mean is it contained a latent energy. All the people in the room, talking and drinking and laughing, casting sideways glances. And the room itself — dimly lit, perhaps a few pieces of carefully selected artwork adorning the walls. Everything contributed to creating this latent energy. And then you stepped into the room, and you changed it.
What exactly did you change?
This is not a question of charisma, like lighting up the room. That’s too monolithic. This framing is, more abstractly, about your force field, the way you contort the world around you everywhere you go. It’s about what I’m calling your energy.
What is interesting about energy is how little we attend to it. There is a reason for this. It becomes clear when we contrast it with other things we focus more on.
Try to recall the last time you left home without looking in the mirror. It’s the way we see through the eyes of others, looking at ourselves in the mirror, nodding agreement with how we present visually: ok not my best hair day but good enough, I guess.
We have other mirrors too. Therapists are mirrors of the psyche (at least in theory). They reflect our inner worlds so we can see ourselves more clearly (and sometimes painfully).
The problem with energy is there exists no clear mirror. Nothing for you to look into that will cast a reflection for you to see or feel or cognate or whatever the medium would call for, allowing you to process your contortion-making presence.
I want this. I have wanted an energy mirror so much I’ve long tried to create my own. The best I’ve come up with so far is incomplete, but not nothing. I see it as a make-up mirror. It’s microcosmic. It reflects fragments, glimpses of how we contort the world around us, but never the full picture.
If you pay enough attention to conversations — specifically one-on-ones — you can view something of your energy projection through this make-up mirror. You have to notice across conversations. Do you open people up emotionally? Are you that person who everyone entrusts with their secrets? Please don’t tell this to anyone else, you’re the only person I’ve told. Do people always seem to approach you for some reason or other, as if you invite conversation merely by being there?
Sitting in an Uber the other night, with my youngest brother, we began talking about something. It was nothing, fodder conversation. The driver chimed in, uninvited. She was affable, effervescent though a bit goofy, but altogether someone you don’t mind letting in. We started talking — my brother and I — about a friend. Specifically about the difference in the way this friend comes off, like a book, from his cover vs. the pages contained within.
Once again the driver commented, so I turned the question on her: how do you think you affect people? I was curious about what she would say vs. my read of her. An extended pause, and then: no one’s ever asked me that before. I smiled, meeting her eyes briefly in the mirror, leaving room for the silence to settle.