The Mirror

The Mirror
by Laura Delano at Brownstone Institute

[This is chapter one from Laura Delano’s Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, 2025). Brownstone Institute is grateful for permission to reprint.] 

It happened in front of the mirror as I brushed my teeth one Thursday evening. The year was 1996, and I was thirteen. Outside, the trees were thick and verdant, still weeks away from morphing into the polychromatic splendor of fall. Eighth grade had just begun, which meant goodbye to summer sports camps, mornings at the country club pool, beach days under the Maine sun. I was now faced with the upcoming season of national squash tournaments, schoolwork, and my new responsibilities as incoming middle school president, which included standing with our headmistress each Friday morning to lead assembly. My bones buzzed with this unfamiliar social power I possessed: elected leader, role model, student of character. I wasn’t sure which feeling to trust in my gut, the thrill or the terror.

There I stood at the sink: thin arms, broad shoulders, lean, muscular legs covered with picked scabs and their purple consequences. My dirty-blond hair, chopped close to my chin, was flattened on my head from spending the evening in a baseball hat. I was aswim in my favorite T-shirt, the one that said “Hockey Is Life: The Rest Is Just Details.” Over my underwear, I wore my favorite pair of boys’ polka-dot boxer shorts.

What happened next as I watched myself in the mirror that night still feels close enough to describe like it’s happening now: The edges of my vision start to blur. My arms become gangly foreign objects that seem to have sealed themselves to my shoulder sockets. My eyes lock straight ahead against my will, taking me down a narrowing pastel tunnel that morphs to gray and then black. All that’s left is my visage in the glass. I stare, leaning closer over the sink, riveted by the sight of my face, my eyes. This face, these eyes. That girl’s face and her eyes. A stranger now in front of me, someone I don’t recognize.

Who is she?

For a brief moment, I’m curious.

And then: terror grabs my ankles, shooting up my legs, through my gut, up the sides of my throat to the back of my skull. I disintegrate into a million pieces, floating, fuzzy, disembodied in space, feet gone, nothing locking me to the earth, no legs, no arms, no belly, nothing: I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.

There is only the tunnel through the dark to this stranger. Her brow is furrowed, her mouth agape, those blue eyes wide open with black bullets at their centers.

Why is she staring at me? I blink to see if this unfamiliar girl will go away, but she doesn’t.

Eventually I notice that when I move my hand, she moves hers. When I turn my chin to the left, to the right, she goes right, then left. Somehow, I’m not sure how, I can see that we’re connected. I struggle to make sense of what this means, to differentiate what’s real from what isn’t: Okay, this glass is a mirror, this girl is my reflection, she is me, I am her. But something feels fundamentally different. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? The question loops on repeat until the words become meaningless sounds.

I am no longer the girl who loved to play board games against herself, or the one who created stacks of index cards on which she’d write facts about her favorite animals that she’d obsessively study until memorized. The one who swelled with pride each time she beat a boy on the tennis court, and who trained several times a week to get herself a top ten national squash ranking. The girl who looked forward to her afternoon ritual of grabbing a hunk of Cheddar cheese and a hard pretzel after practice before sitting down to do homework while listening to Billy Joel. I had no idea who that girl was anymore. All I knew was that she was someone else.

I left the bathroom in a daze, passing walls decorated with framed Christmas card photos of my two younger sisters and me in color coordination; a black-and-white picture of my twentysomething parents walking hand in hand in white lace and black tails down the aisle of a giant Manhattan church; an old photograph of my relative, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aged ten or so, leaning on the net of the family’s grass tennis court at their Hudson River estate alongside a dozen cousins and his grandfather; my father’s collected oil paintings of beach scenes, his woodblock prints of old farmhouses.

Excruciating thoughts raced through my mind that night in bed as I tried to make sense of what had just happened: I must not have a real self. My whole life’s been fake. All those good grades and accomplishments and expectations I’ve been working for don’t mean anything. It’s all a performance—I’m just a fraud who’s been tricking everyone into thinking I’m Laura, and I’m so good at it that I’ve even tricked myself. Is anything I’ve accomplished actually what I wanted? Do I actually care about the things I’ve always thought I care about? Have I just been brainwashed by them? Did they make me do it?

I’d always taken the opinions of others as trusted signposts on the path to worthiness: a classmate’s compliment on my painting, gratitude from a friend’s parent as I cleared the dinner table, the smile of an elderly stranger after I held the door open for her. Absence of approval felt indistinguishable from blunt criticism, and it was the praise of adult authority figures that I most craved. By listening carefully to what I was told, following the rules, studying hard, practicing diligently, I would one day grow so saturated with external approval that it would no longer need to be the animating force of my life. Now this unfamiliar, nefarious they swirled in my mind, quickly becoming obvious as the cause of my newly discovered fraudulence. They were a dark force that was not to be trusted: my parents, my teachers, my school, the manicured hedges and bright smiles that characterized my affluent hometown. It seemed so clear now: they controlled me. They controlled all girls. They convince us we have to look a certain way, talk a certain way, perform a certain way, I thought. We’re just puppets.

The only option I saw before me was to run away and make a fresh start. I’d move to Maine, where my grandmother lived in the 250-year-old farmhouse where she and Grampy had raised my father, aunt, and uncle. I’d spent every year looking forward to August, when my mother would drive my sisters and me up there for the month and my father would join us on weekends after work. I spent my days scouring tide pools for crabs, building drip castles with Mom out of muddy sand, reading books on the porch as I listened to peepers in the bog at dusk. I popped bubbly seaweed between my fingers as I watched Dad fish for striped bass along the rocky coast. He’d let me stand in front of him to have a turn casting, wrapping his arms around my shoulders to help me reel in the line when I was too small to do it alone, and when I grew big enough to manage the rod by myself, he’d stand back and take a swig from his sweaty can of Fresca as he watched. My legs were always decorated with mosquito bites, my feet splintered from barefoot trips through the old barn to find empty swallows’ eggs. On overcast days, the low drone of a nearby foghorn added to the soundtrack of chugging lobster boat engines and occasional tugboat horns, these, the only sounds that reminded me there was a world out there that I was so afraid I’d never be good enough for.

In Maine, I could pretend life back home in Greenwich had never existed, and so I resolved to endure the next twenty-four hours until I could sit down with my parents and let them know I planned to leave it all behind.

The morning after the mirror, as I pulled on my polo shirt and buttoned my school kilt, I was flooded with a new understanding: The uniform was a costume. School, a performance.

Breakfast looked the same as always: My two sisters sitting next to me swinging their feet from rickety wooden stools at the kitchen table. Nina, three years younger than me, was a lover of Eloise books and an avid POG collector; Chase, six years my junior, already shared my obsessions with ice hockey and boys’ clothes. The glass jar of whole milk that had been delivered by the milkman on the counter next to our Lucky Charms, Multi Grain Cheerios, and Müeslix boxes. Mom flipping through her worn leather organizer, scanning each page of flawless cursive writing that carefully mapped out our days as a cup of creamy coffee steamed next to her and she strummed the counter with manicured fingers.

I can picture myself sitting there, trying my best to participate, to feel authentic in my eating, my reading, my talking, my good posture, to not implode. But I’d fallen into the space between my ears and was pounding on the walls to get out.

A sea of hunter-green tartan overwhelmed me as I stood next to our headmistress at the front of the assembly hall an hour later.

Two hundred little bodies sat before us, elbows pushing into thighs, chins nestled into cupped hands, eyes locked on me. Mrs. Franklin’s voice was dull and muffled, like she was coming out of a radio fifty feet away. I stared ahead and unfocused my eyes until the hall faded into a calming blur. And then reality clenched my neck. I am actually up here onstage in front of everyone.

She’d been talking for a while, about what I wasn’t sure. I looked down and noticed how clumsy my hands seemed, connected to these clunky arm things. I panicked that the back of my kilt was stuck in the waistband of my boxers, ran my palms beneath the loose pleats behind me as subtly as possible, and sighed relief as my fingertips traced the worn wool. I pictured strings coming up through my hands and arms and feet and legs, up from my head. I forced myself to take a deep breath, lift my chin, and set my shoulders back, wondering who was controlling me now.

Our living room was less a space we lived in and more one used for social rituals like the occasional cocktail party, a visit from the distant, elderly cousin of a grandparent, or the annual opening of Christmas stockings as Bing Crosby played on repeat. I don’t know why my parents and I sat there the evening after that first assembly, but I remember how hard I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in that I’d get what I was about to ask for.

I took a deep breath and told my parents the plan. “I can’t be middle school president. I can’t go to Greenwich Academy. I can’t be here anymore. I want to go live with Grammy in Maine and start school there. Start over.”

My mother cocked her head and looked at me like I was a crooked painting. “Laura, I don’t understand. What happened? Where is this coming from?” My father sat quietly next to her.

I shook my head in frustration, my body suddenly tight. No, no, no, it’s not meant to go like this. Screaming felt like the only expression intense enough to mirror what was happening inside me. I sensed where this was going, and it was nowhere good.

“Nothing happened! I just can’t be here anymore. Please, I hate it here. Please just let me go!”

“Laura, you can’t just move to Maine,” my father said. “What about all your friends here? Your teachers? Your coaches? You can’t just leave everything behind. You have a big year ahead of you. And you can’t live with Grammy. That’d be too much to ask of her. Maine is a place for us to visit, not live.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head vigorously, as if doing so might freeze the scene. “Please. Please. PLEASE let me go!” I pleaded, wringing my hands in front of me, overwhelmed by an urge to stomp my feet. If only I could make them understand why this was so important, but I couldn’t tell them that I’d realized I was a fraud, that I didn’t have a real self, that Maine was the only place that could save me. My parents were a part of the problem, after all.

“I hate you! I hate my life!” I screamed. “Fuck you!” My parents were shocked. I couldn’t believe I’d uttered the word myself.

“What have we done? Why are you so angry?” My mother’s eyes were tearing up and tinged with panic; I could feel her hurt. I paced the room, wanting to rip my hair out, whacking my sides with balled-up fists.

“I can’t handle the pressure. Can’t handle it. I can’t handle it!” My screams escalated until it felt like my throat was ripping open. I coughed involuntarily, gasped for air, and then screamed again, and again, and again, as my parents sat there wide-eyed. I stormed out of the room, seeping a new, rancid rage. It was rage, I can see now, that seemed the best means of self-protection. Like a siren song, rage beckoned me: Shoot me at them so they can’t control you anymore. I’ll keep you safe. I’ll protect you.

The Mirror
by Laura Delano at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society