I spent almost half a decade looking into the mirror and seeing someone else. Who did I see? Someone who everyone else expected me to be.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Carl Jung
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known… And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12-13
The Barriers We Build
What were the barriers to love?
People-pleasing. Being who others need me to be doesn’t give my true self the opportunity to be loved. It also doesn’t give someone else the opportunity to be loved by my true self. We’re both loving and being loved by a performance, not a person.
Fear of abandonment kept me trapped for so long. I didn’t believe they could love the real me, so fear stopped real love from getting through. I chose the safety of a shallow connection over the risk of deep rejection.
Perfectionism. Again, being who others need to get my needs met. But I forgot that belonging is a need too—and you can’t belong somewhere as someone you’re not.
These barriers keep us from seeing clearly in the mirror. We look at our reflection and can’t see our true value and worth. We see only what needs fixing, what needs hiding, what needs performing.
The Soil of Our Hearts
Seeds of love need the broken-open soil of our true hearts to grow roots in—not the hardened outer soil of ego. Writing gave me a safe space to explore my pain. It gave me freedom to express whatever I felt without apology or explanation.
Authenticity and truth-telling became a plow in the soil of my heart. My first book told the story of a young woman who was abused and developed a gift in her teenage years to read minds. She used this ability to escape and find her way to people who truly cared about her. I didn’t realize then that I was writing my deepest longing—to be seen, understood, and loved for who I really was.
The Pattern Begins
My father expected me to behave in quiet ways that didn’t get on his nerves. Once I spilled tea. Another time I crashed the car. When I wound up in the hospital with an infection after my first child was born, he was upset about his life being disrupted. The only way to restore peace was to apologize and promise to do better next time.
I never felt close to him. Real love just wasn’t possible when I had to constantly manage his comfort levels. I learned early that my needs, my mistakes, my very existence were inconveniences to be minimized.
Breaking the Mirror
When we’re ready to see clearly—when we “know fully” as Paul writes—we discover something revolutionary: the love was there all along, waiting beneath our defenses. But first, the mirror has to crack.
Sometimes our old ways of being have to shatter completely before we can see past our reflections to what’s really there. Broken relationships, broken patterns, broken expectations—these aren’t just losses. They’re opportunities to discover what lies beneath all our careful construction.
The cracks in our world right now mirror the cracks in our individual lives. People are projecting their fears onto the most vulnerable, desperately trying to eliminate what they see as weakness. Others are projecting onto leaders the impossible expectation that someone else will save them from their discomfort.
But what if we looked beneath our fears and focused on what we can actually control? What if we learned to see our own needs clearly and meet them ourselves?
Questions for Your Mirror
Who do you see when you look in the mirror—who others need you to be, or who you really are?
When you look at others, are you frustrated because they aren’t who you need them to be? Are you hiding parts of yourself you know will upset them?
Do you find joy in spending time with people who accept you as you are, or are you constantly making sure you’re doing things that make them happy?
Are you afraid of rejection if you mess up?
Changing the Pattern
As a parent, I didn’t realize I was giving conditional love—praising when my children performed well and chastising when they sought what they needed in ways that inconvenienced me. How many times did I cry out in frustration instead of soaking in the beautiful picture they drew or the flowers they picked for me?
We can change the pattern by noticing. When we see our children hurting, we can stop viewing it as our failure and instead see it as an opportunity to create what we never had—a relationship where love isn’t conditional.
Let them be who they are. Give them what you needed but didn’t receive. Notice them. Make room for them. Show them that their existence is not an inconvenience but a gift.
Living from Abundance
The barriers to love are the projections and expectations that keep us from our true selves. I’m convinced that self-care—living from the abundance of one’s true self—is more important than self-sacrifice.
If we’re giving ourselves away to earn approval from God or anyone else, something is fundamentally wrong. Real love doesn’t require us to shrink, perform, or apologize for existing.
When we finally stop seeing ourselves through others’ expectations and start seeing ourselves as we truly are—worthy of love, deserving of space, valuable just as we exist—then we can offer that same gift to others.
The Mirror, Clear at Last
I still look in the mirror every day. But now I catch a glimpse of someone different. A woman who writes her truth. Who takes up space apologizing less. Who loves imperfectly but authentically. Who knows that the cracks in her story aren’t flaws to hide but places where the light gets in. Sometimes. But that’s progress.
The greatest barrier to love isn’t our imperfection—it’s our unwillingness to be seen in it. When we finally let ourselves be known fully, cracks and all, we discover what Paul promised: we are already fully known, and fully loved.
The mirror was never the problem. We just needed to learn how to see.
A Liminal Space 
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