'I lived without mirrors in my house for a week, and now I wish they were never invented.'

How many times a day do you see your reflection?

In mirrors, in shiny shopping windows, in the camera of your phone — we are constantly watching ourselves, and it's something most of us are not even really aware of. I certainly wasn't — not until I stopped seeing myself at all. And that's how I really saw myself for the first time.

The beginning of April marked a month of chaos for me as I moved from Sydney to Melbourne. I made the rookie decision of actually trying to take all of my belongings with me instead of selling them on Facebook marketplace, and paid dearly for my naivety in the form of nightmare removalists.

The result was that my stuff was simply not delivered, and I had to live for more than a week without basic essentials like my TV, coffee mugs, step stool (I cannot reach anything in this house), tripod or even my wall-mounted bedroom mirror.

The only mirror in the new, three-story premises is on the top floor in the bathroom. There aren't any mirrors in the bedroom or hallways, and there aren't many windows to catch a glimpse of yourself, either.

Having a mirror by the front door meant I could always check my appearance before I left the house.

This should have posed a dilemma — in my old place, I had a mirror in every room, and even one near the front door for one last touch-up before I left the house. I was constantly making sure I looked 'perfect', adjusting my face, my hijab, my clothes. But in this place, if I wanted to have one final glance before leaving the house, I'd have to go up two very long, winding flights of stairs.

Suddenly, I wasn't hyper-fixating on bumps on my skin, desperately looking for the beginnings of a whitehead to slap a pimple patch onto. I had no idea if my skin was looking dry, if my lips needed a bit of colour, if my eye bags looked worse than usual, or if I needed to pop some concealer on.

Given how much of an absolute nightmare the move was, I can guarantee I probably looked horrendous — but I had no idea, because I was rarely close enough to a mirror to check. It's amazing how the lack of access made me completely forget that I have a reflection.

The truth is, not having access to a mirror was liberating. It made me realise how bad it was for my psyche to be constantly monitoring my appearance. Without knowing what I looked like, I was suddenly able to live my life makeup-free, and with little care about how I was presenting myself. As someone who is sometimes camera-facing for my work, this was pretty much unfathomable before.

Getting used to my makeup-free skin and chapped lips has been a game changer.

There's a beautiful piece of writing by Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Diquet, in which he discusses mirrors as "poison" for the human heart.

"Man shouldn't be able to see his own face — there's nothing more sinister," he wrote.

"Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.

"Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.

"The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."

Video: Six minute self-love meditation. Article continues below.

Even before my recent escapades, this quote lived rent-free in my mind, but until now, I've never felt it to be so true.

Even the cameras in our phones are a sinister force — with the rise of AI in newer phone cameras, our reflections are distorted so minutely (and without any notice) that we often develop warped ideas of what we actually look like.

My friend's Android phone has automatic AI — which meant it touched up my face in this photo without asking me. It wigged me out for weeks as I tried to recapture how pretty I felt here before I realised the truth.

Pair this with the use of Instagram and TikTok filters, and the fact that cameras inherently flatten your features in a way that mirrors don't, and we've got an even more poisonous way of seeing our reflections (if you could even call these images "reflections"). For many of us, these 'reflections' can haunt our every thought.

My bedroom mirror was delivered by my lovely family who drove all of my things down from Sydney yesterday, but I'm yet to unpack it from its box. In a way, I want to keep living in my fantastical world of only seeing my reflection when I wash my hands or brush my teeth. I want to break free from the shackles of narcissism and self-obsession, where a glimpse of my reflection is almost a reward for my self-adjusting compulsions.

Maybe breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck — or maybe that's just what the world wants us to think. After all, we live in a society where women feeling apathy about their reflection threatens an entire industry designed to profit off our insecurities and our never-ending pursuit of perfection.

At this point, I'd take the risk — better bad luck than a bad sense of self-esteem. I'd rather be free.

Feature image: Supplied.