You Cannot Unsee This

A warped mirror in Aruba, and the belief that quietly decides how you age.

There’s an elevator in a hotel in Aruba that I’ve ridden a hundred times. Same trip every year, same friends, same holiday week. The mirror in that elevator warped a little at some point, probably from the heat and the salt air, so the reflection it gives you back is never quite flattering. You’re standing there in your bathing suit, sun-baked, sandy, and you’ve got a solid thirty seconds of nowhere to look but at yourself.

For years, I used that thirty seconds to destroy myself.

Fat. Wrinkly. Flabby. Old. A teardown from top to bottom, every single ride. And I want to be clear here, I have been in good shape for a long time. The criticism had almost nothing to do with what my body actually looked like. This was a habit. A reflex. A script I ran without ever questioning it.

My daughter asked me once why I talked to myself that way. I didn’t have a good answer.

Around that same time, I was seeing a guy who had, genuinely, the best body of anyone I have ever known. And he’d stand in front of a mirror and call himself a fat fuck. We talked about it more than once, because it didn’t make sense to either of us, and what we landed on was this: you never arrive. There is no body, no version of yourself where you finally look in the mirror and think, I’m done, I’m amazing, no notes. The voice doesn’t go quiet when you get fit. It just finds something new to say.

And here’s what stopped me eventually. I thought about the fact that if any other human being on this earth spoke to me the way I spoke to myself in that elevator, I would cut them out of my life. Immediately. No second chances. Inexcusable. And yet I let myself say it to me, on repeat, for years, like it was just the cost of standing in front of a mirror.

That’s when I started paying attention to how I talked to myself. My mother was a psychoanalyst, and I grew up hearing some version of, “I don’t care what they did, what did you do?” It could be infuriating. It could also be clarifying. You were never only a passive character in her worldview. She always wanted to know where your agency was and what part of the pattern belonged to you.

Then one day it clicked that her world, unconscious patterns and repetition, was taking a completely different route to the same place as the manifestation world, energy, frequency, attracting what you focus on. Two frameworks that agree on almost nothing, landing in the exact same conclusion.

Once I recognized the overlap, I started seeing versions of it everywhere.

Modern neuroscience increasingly describes the brain not as a camera passively recording the world, but as a prediction engine. It is constantly guessing what you’re about to see, feel, and experience, then updating those predictions as new information comes in.

In other words, you’re not simply observing your life. You’re experiencing your brain’s best prediction of it, updated in real time.

That means the story you carry about your body, your age, and your capability isn’t just background noise. It shapes what you notice and what even registers as possible.

Cognitive psychology says interpretation shapes experience. Self-fulfilling prophecy research shows that expectations alter behavior, which can alter outcomes. Self-efficacy research shows that believing you can act affects whether you begin and persist. Cybernetics describes it as a feedback loop, thought shaping behavior shaping outcome shaping belief, on repeat. Existential philosophy says we build meaning through our choices.

Different rooms. Different vocabularies. Different starting questions. Yet they keep circling the same unsettling idea: we are not passive observers of our own lives.

The Pattern Underneath All of It

Once you lay these side by side, a loop shows up. Identity shapes what you pay attention to. Attention shapes how you interpret what happens to you. Interpretation shapes what you do. What you do, repeated enough times, shapes your environment and your results. Those results feed back and either confirm or challenge the identity you started with. And the loop runs again.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to. Once you actually see this loop, once you understand that the story you’re running about yourself isn’t a harmless internal monologue but the thing quietly steering your choices, you cannot go back to not knowing it. You can’t rewatch your own life and pretend the voice in the elevator was neutral. You can’t unhear your daughter’s question. The mirror stops being just a mirror.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t mean this loop explains everything that happens to you. It doesn’t. Bodies get sick. People hurt us. Genetics and plain bad luck are real, and none of that is yours to manifest your way out of or unconsciously blame yourself for. What this loop actually governs is narrower and still enormous: it’s what you notice, how you respond, what you repeat, and what starts to feel possible next, inside whatever reality you’ve actually been handed.

This is where it lands hardest for me, in the room I’ve built my whole career around. Aging is one of the places this matters most. If I believe weakness, stiffness, and shrinking capability are just what a woman my age should expect, that belief changes what I ask of my body before I’ve even noticed I’m asking less. I stop challenging it. I treat every ache as proof decline has started. The belief becomes behavior, the behavior becomes years of small choices, and eventually my body looks like confirmation of the story I told it to become.

I think about that question my daughter asked me more than I think about almost anything else from that era of my life. I think about every woman I’ve stood next to at the gym, in a dressing room, at a dinner table, saying some version of the same garbage about her own body that I used to say about mine, like it’s just the tax you pay for being a woman who cares about her health. It isn’t. It was never a requirement. It was a habit nobody questioned, including me, for a long time.

I still ride that elevator every year. The mirror is still warped. It doesn’t hand me back some glowing, perfected version of myself. It never will. But I don’t treat the reflection as an invitation to attack anymore. Some days I notice something I don’t love. Some days I look tired. Some days I look strong. Mostly, I just let myself be a woman standing in an elevator in a bathing suit, heading back down to the rest of her vacation.

Understanding this loop is the first half. It tells you what’s happening. It doesn’t tell you how to change what you keep repeating when you’re tired, busy, or in pain, and insight alone has never once gotten anyone through a hard Tuesday.

That’s what systems are for. That’s next.