When a Gaze Grows a Person
Have you ever had someone look at you with stars in their eyes? Their face lights up. Both of you seem to expand to a place where every colour is brighter, every smell sweeter. You feel warm inside. Loved.
This person could be your mother, father, partner, perhaps even a stranger or beloved pet.
When they look at you, they see and accept you for your true self. There is no need to hide.
You like the version of yourself that gets reflected back to you in their eyes.
Yet, this person does not want to hold you fixed as you are. They want you to grow. They want to experience every phase and form of you. In fact, they relish it.
They see your potential even more than you do.
It makes it easy to have confidence in yourself and the bravery to try new things. You know you are safe.
Sometimes “seeing someone’s potential” becomes toxic- especially when that imagined potential clashes with who the person actually is.
But your viewer sees the person you will grow into while also accepting- and loving- who you are now.
They don’t deny, obfuscate, or justify. They don’t need to.
In fact, if they did, that would diminish you, because you would know their gaze doesn’t reflect reality. You would know that they aren’t seeing you clearly. This gaze isn’t love, it is pity and desperation. And it is a curse, rather than a blessing.
When a Gaze Diminishes a Person
There are many ways a person can wilt you with their gaze. This often isn’t a sharp jab to your identity the moment their eyes land on you, but rather a slow attrition of everything that you are.
You have to fight the current of their gaze to maintain yourself.
This wilting gaze always comes from not seeing you fully; from only seeing the parts of you that are of use to them.
You may genuinely carry some of these qualities within you, or they may simply project onto you the qualities that they wish you had- like a broken projector casting a warped image of you onto your body.
This type of person can take beautiful things and leave them broken. A shadow of their former selves.
And when they do, they will find new beautiful things to use and destroy. And on and on.
Your body may feel like your home, but under the gaze of this person, it suddenly shrinks to a space they want to occupy. Not you.
You no longer occupy your own body.
In fact, you want to flee it under their gaze to keep yourself in tact as their eyes feast on the fantasy.
Feeling a Person’s Gaze
I have learned to ask myself how I feel when a person is looking at me. The reaction of my body tells me things that my mind does not yet comprehend.
This reaction is an indicator of my next move. Do I move forward with the relationship, or run from it?
Will it lead to self-contortion, people-pleasing, and ruin? Or growth, joy, and success?
Through the feeling of their gaze, you get a hint.
Your Own Gaze
This ocular crossroad does not only occur when you look at another’s expression toward you. It occurs every time you step in front of a mirror.
Does your own gaze grow you or shrink you?
Do your pupils dilate when you see yourself in the mirror, or do you not like to make eye-contact with the person standing in the reflection?
Are you a witness to your own beauty, or a denier of it?
Do you see a beautiful paradox in front of you: one that is timeless, yet constantly changing?
Or is it an untrustworthy mirage- becoming whatever people want to see? Hazy, and unclear. Based on company and circumstance.
Your Own Beauty
I invite everyone to explore their own beauty today. Not society’s version of your beauty. But your beauty. The beauty you were born with. Those authentic parts of you that time won’t touch.
The way we look at beautiful things matters- a gaze can heal or destroy- even if the gaze is your own.
Messy Bun Book Lover