Mirror Self

I look in the mirror,
and I wonder
who the person
staring back
truly is.
I see myself,
the self I've always known.
Yet I wonder,
is this really me?
Is my inside-self
separate from my
outside-self,
the one you see
when you walk down the street?
Does the girl in the mirror
deceive me?
Is this not
who I am,
but who I am
supposed to be?
Questions I can't answer,
maybe never will.

Sometimes it feels like
my body is just the keeper
of the person I actually am.
My thoughts and feelings
are unattatched
to my appearance.
They are separate beings
united by chance.
I know this isn't 
quite true,
but it's hard
not to feel that way
sometimes.
That my mirror self
isn't who I am.
And she
never will be.

I wonder
what passersby see
when I walk down the street.
They probably don't think of me
at all.
But if they do--
even if it doesn't fully register--
I'm sure that they
are making assumptions
assumptions that aren't 
always true.
Assumptions that
aren't necessarily bad
but that aren't right either.
Assumptions that you make
when you see someone's
mirror self
and not their
true one.

When people get to know me,
they see past my mirror self,
and I see past theirs
too.
I hadn't had friends like that
friends who truly know who you are,
in and out,
in forever
until this year.
So long
that I 
almost became
the girl in the mirror
because I thought
she was all 
I could ever be.

Except this year,
I realized
I didn't have to be her
anymore.
That my true self
was better than
the one in the mirror.
I stopped worrying about
things I knew were true
about me
but that my mirror self 
tried to hide.
I made friends
who discovered my true self,
and still loved me,
maybe even more
than before.
I let myself
be myself,
and decided
to ignore
the girl in the mirror
for once
because she wasn't real
and I was.