no mirrors!

I have a pimple.
A rather impressive one. Perhaps not quite classically "visible from across the room", but impossible to miss in close quarters. It's between my mid-nose and my right cheekbone, a location that's high on, but not at the top of, the conspicuous scale. It's a deep pimple, one with a life cycle of at least a week...it started out four days ago as a subcutaneous entity to be ignored. By yesterday, a yellowishness had surfaced, necessitating a decision: lance and squeeze, or not. I chose the former. The first draining was sadly not the last; hopefully that will be tonight or tomorrow. No regrets, let's move ahead. Fortunately, today and yesterday have been hermit days. Tomorrow however, i must do a P.R. event for my peanut butter job. Ah well, the pageant of life. It will be a character-tweaking reminder of the nonsensical miseries we all face.
Pimples struck in my teens. The low point was when i returned to school after having mono. One of my concert band friends asked whether i had chicken pox. I tried one of those little makeup sticks, and i allowed my folks to take my stoic self to a dermatologist, bless them. The biggest point that the dermatologist made was to leave pimples alone, when at all possible. Good advice, but yellow pimples simply must be dealt with (there was a girl on the subway the other day so in need, it killed me to not take her home and take care of her). Once a dermatologist has maintenanced you, you pick up on the technique of pricking the skin before squeezing, to reduce collateral damage.
I would occasionally get pimples elsewhere, but mostly on my face. If you've ever had a grand nose pimple, you know a special kind of misery. The only unforgettable pimple of my life was at my side forehead hairline; its placement made it inconspicuous, but it was so large and deep that the pressure of it actually hurt, and when i squeezed it, a string of yellow goo came out that was measurable in inches.
As an adult, pimple frequency has gone down enough that i've been complimented on my great skin. This is nice, but personality scars can last longer than the blemishes themselves. Pimples didn't dominate my adolescent psyche, but they tried, how they tried. Staring at the mirror, longing for the day when they would be gone...oh my god, i would tear up the world when that day came, talking to any girl, free of fear! Free! On particularly bad days, i did my turtly best to hide from society.
When i did finally pass the prime pimple years, i found that the path to freedom from social fear was something i still had to work at. The human psyche in this damaged society is usually far better at creating obstacles than overcoming them.
Around the age of thirty, pimples began to frequent my derriere, but that's not so bad.
In a perfectly healthy world, mirrors would be rare. In our world they are like clocks, everywhere. In a perfect world, we would all just unself-consciously be who we are. In our world, almost all of us finds a source of misery in the images that stare back at us...pimples, freckles, unwanted hair, fat face, yellow teeth, wrinkles, a scar, big nose, kinky hair, eye bags, thin lips, skin color...most of these sources of misery are pure silliness, and none of them have anything to do with our true beauty.
Imagine a world, a world of no mirrors...