Take a look at yourself

You have never seen yourself the way others see you.  For 99.9% of people I would estimate this to be true.  I don't just mean in a metaphorical sense, but in a physical sense too.  We are never in a position naturally where we can actually look at ourselves as other people see us.  What you see in a mirror is a mirror-image of yourself, it's flipped, and depending on the construction of the mirror, clarity, cut, and thickness, the image you see is distorted.  This isn't the same image someone else sees of you when they look at you.

When it comes to cameras there is a saying that the camera adds ten pounds, while many people laugh this idea off as being perpetuated by people who don't like having their photo taken, the truth is, most cameras actually do.  The reason they do alter your appearance is largely down to the construction of the lens of the camera, very few cameras beyond high end models with a high price tag actually try to recreate the lens of the human eye.  What a camera sees and what a person sees are very different things.  If you have ever looked up at the night sky and gazed with wonder and awe at the stars that fill your field of view, only to find an infinite black nothingness blurred and patchy when you try to point your camera at it, then you'll know how things like ISO can greatly alter the image the camera can capture. 

The bottom line here is that no camera can as yet perfectly match the human eye.  Knowing this, while the vast amount of photos we take of ourselves and other people populate our devices and eat up our storage capacity, the reality is that reality is never truly captured.  The only people you could argue even come close to being able to look at themselves as other people would, are identical twins - although the person they look at isn't actually them, and even here while twins can appear identical to other people, the twins themselves often notice differences that can let them distinguish who is who in photos etc.  The idea that parents of twins are forever confused about which one is which, while comedic in effect, in practice becomes almost non-existent with age.  As two people grow, no matter how similar their lives are, over time differences develop.

So really when you stop and think about it, even if you rig a complex system of mirrors to allow yourself to look at yourself with the correct orientation and flipping, even in a hall of mirrors or a fun-house the fact you can't perfectly recreate the conditions of the perceptions others have of you really does mean that you probably never have seen yourself the way others see you, physically, knowing this, at least for me, makes it somehow easier to accept you have never seen yourself metaphorically the way others see you either.

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