You close your eyes and try to picture your own face. You think you know what it looks like — after all, you’ve seen it in the mirror a million times. But if you stay with that thought, it gets weird. Everything starts to blur, details slip away. You try to grab your nose — can’t do it. In your mind, it’s not a clear portrait, just fuzzy strokes: like there are eyebrows, lips, hair, but it’s all floating in a fog.

Inside your head, there’s not a picture, but a feeling of yourself. Hard to catch. Like the smell of your childhood home — you’re sure you remember it exactly, but when you try to put it into words or fake it, it turns out totally different.

Even if you imagine a mirror inside you — it’s a trick again. There’s a reflection. That same upside-down face you’ve gotten used to over the years. But that’s not how others see you.

In photos, it’s a different person altogether. The smile breaks in the wrong place, the eyes look a bit empty or too tense. A stranger’s gaze.

So it turns out: everyone around knows your real look better than you do.

You’re the only person on earth who’s never met yourself the way others see you.

You start to wonder — what image do you even carry inside? It’s a patchwork of other people’s reactions and quick memories of how you looked from the outside: when someone looks you straight in the face and suddenly smiles or frowns… But that response is always filtered through someone else’s view.

Sometimes you catch yourself recognizing a mole or the shape of your eyebrow in a photo as coldly as you’d recognize a stranger’s ID from the past.

Here’s another weird thing: most people slightly polish their inner portrait. Not on purpose — it’s just how the brain works. A bit more symmetry, softer features, warmer tones… It’s easier to live with yourself inside your head that way.

If you stop believing in those little upgrades — something like a gloomy realism kicks in. Seeing sharper and harsher. Not much joy there.

And even that improved version is out of reach for a real face-to-face. You’ve never come across your own face, face to face.

Remembering your face feels like retelling a story about yourself: every time the angle shifts, new details replace the old.

No real record remains.

The longer you turn this thought over, the more you realize: you live inside a myth about yourself. Your face exists only as a guess between reflections and other people’s eyes.

Maybe no one has ever truly met themselves?