Glass is such an unique material. Hard-shelled, crystal-clear. It shatters if you breathe wrong. Hard and fragile - what an oxymoron. For a long time, I thought people were like that too: glass. Transparent enough that, if you looked closely, you could see the gears turning. Most of us wear a tough outer layer to survive the bumps, while quietly guarding our fragile little egos. The light inside us beams outwards; sometimes a soft glow, sometimes a flare and together those beams make a kind of kaleidoscopes and we call it life. And then there are days when the darkness inside gulps everything down. No prismatic beauty, just a blackout. (And time takes it all, but that’s another story.)

Lately, though, I’ve been second-guessing that metaphor. Maybe we’re not glass. Maybe we’re mirrors. Maybe what I thought was transparency was just reflection - my own thoughts looking back at me from someone else’s surface. It’s funny how confident we get about knowing “what kind of person” someone is. As if we’ve earned X-ray vision by surviving our own past. But a lot of the time, we’re just projecting and stacking our experiences into neat opinions, then mistaking those opinions for truth. That certainty is a slippery slope. It feels solid until you step wrong.

But then we’re memers. We imitate. We do what we see. That’s how we’ve always moved forward - copy, remix, repeat. It’s not all bad. Mimicry is the scaffolding that let us build nearly everything: families, rituals, codes, countries. And still, despite all that, there’s this relentless need to find someone who just “gets me”. That’s the contradiction that loops in my head: we’re endlessly shaped by each other, but we crave the rare human tuning fork that hums at our frequency.

So maybe the truth sits in the middle, between glass and mirror, changing with the light. Like those one-way privacy panes that look opaque from the brighter side. Flood someone with attention, judgment, spotlight and suddenly they are a mirror, and you only see yourself. Turn down the outside glare, and the same panel becomes a window. Nothing essential changed; the conditions did.

I’ve noticed this in small, ordinary moments. Late at night, when the world finally gets quiet, I can actually hear myself think. That’s when I’m more glass—more see-through, even to me. Drop a casual comment in a crowded thread and suddenly I’m reflecting a thousand strangers’ moods. It’s ridiculous how simple the switch can be.

There’s a comfort in accepting that we’re not one thing. Not totally open or totally opaque. We flex with context. We’re hard and breakable. We shine and we swallow light. Some days I’m a window, some days I’m a funhouse mirror, and once in a while I’m a stained-glass panel and whatever light gets through feels almost like grace. But I am never pure.

And I guess that’s the practice: tweak the lighting. Notice what turns me reflective and what makes me see-through. Dim what drowns me out. Brighten what brings me back. Then step closer to the glass and look, really look. Maybe take a breath and change the angle. Whatever I do I should find a way to look in without breaking anything.