I remember that we celebrated at Lusso at Rockwell.
Friday’s occasion was happy enough: a toast to both the 35th of the twins (one of whom, Danah Gutierrez, is a dear friend), and to their single mother, who bulldozed her way through the world to give them a good life. It was a long dinner filled with self-deprecating humor, stories repeated for latecomers, and laughter amplified by a single glass of wine each. I took only a sip or two, since I was driving. It was certainly not enough to expect what happened the next morning.
I woke later than usual. It was Saturday, after all. The sun was already up. Still groggy, I shuffled into the bathroom. My eyes felt swollen from sleep. I did not bother turning on the light. The small window above the shower let in enough morning brightness for routine matters.
I looked up at the medicine cabinet mirror and, for a moment, I did not recognize myself.
What I saw was not merely an older version of my face. It was a grotesque corruption of it. The lines around my mouth deepened, as if ready to bleed from a wound. My jowls hung heavy. My nose appeared enlarged, almost bulbous. The entire face seemed to be expanding before my eyes, bloated like a waterlogged corpse. It lasted for two seconds, maybe three.
I shut my eyes, out of revulsion, and physically turned away from the mirror. I remember the sensation vividly even now: a cold flush running through my body, the sudden certainty that something was terribly wrong. Back in my bedroom stood a full-length mirror. I approached it cautiously, almost embarrassed by my own reaction.
The face staring back was perfectly normal. Or rather, it was my normal. It was the face I had gone to sleep with. I touched it, needing to make sure that what I felt and what I saw matched.
That happened in February. It is now June as I write this, and I have never experienced anything similar since. Yet the incident still haunts me because the fear still feels fresh. The apparition itself was fleeting. The emotional impact was not.
Naturally, I did what educated modern people do when confronted by something they do not understand. I began interrogating experts and annoying my friends. Fortunately, I run a mental health clinic, so the experts are the friends I get to annoy.
Over ramen in a noisy izakaya, two psychologist friends patiently listened to how much the episode had unsettled me. They explained that our brains recognize faces through familiar patterns. Human beings are astonishingly good at identifying people from fragments: a silhouette across a parking lot, the gait of a walk, the angle of a head seen from behind. Recognition, one said, is photographic and pictographic rather than a word-by-word reading. The brain constantly fills in gaps. Occasionally, it fills them in incorrectly.
Visual processing can go awry without being a delusion. While one friend suggested sleep inertia and dim lighting altered my vision, my cheekier friend told me to update my glasses and stop fussing. Yet, they also offered an observation that stuck: appearance anxieties are gendered. Men fear diminishment—becoming smaller or weaker—while women are conditioned to fear enlargement, worrying about becoming wider or softer. It struck a nerve, describing my exact reaction with uncomfortable precision.
Men fear diminishment—becoming smaller or weaker—while women fear enlargement
This mix of clinical validation and snark comforted me. Mostly.
What still disturbs me is not the distortion itself, but the visceral disgust and horror I felt—the immediate conviction that my own face was unacceptable. While what I momentarily saw wasn’t true, the fear of it becoming reality if I “let myself go” felt entirely palpable. I am approaching 50, that curious, transitional age of reckoning where you are no longer young but not yet old. My skin is smooth but losing its firmness; my body, still capable, but requiring more effort to maintain; and a number of gray strands have appeared at the top of my head. Nothing looks old exactly, just less fresh looking.
Which led me to a more interesting question: What exactly was I afraid of seeing?
A few months later, I told the story to my 81-year-old aunt. She laughed at me incredulously and insisted that nothing like that had ever happened to her—seeing herself as ugly.
“Ano ka ba? How fantastical,” she said. She side-eyed me with an upside-down smile, disapproving of the thought that I considered myself grotesque, even for a moment.
Then she paused. “I don’t enjoy looking at myself in the mirror anymore.”
What still disturbs me is not the distortion itself, but the visceral disgust and horror I felt
That admission took me by surprise.
The UP Diliman Institute of Mass Communication’s first batch called the ‘Magnificanet Seven’ with their teacher, Pacifico “Pic” Aprieto in Herran, Manila, wuth Lydia Rodriguez-Arcellana (center)
My aunt is Dr. Lydia Rodriguez-Arcellana, but to me, she is Ninang Lydia. A former English professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Department of English and Comparative Literature, she has a history that is more legendary still: she belonged to the “Magnificent Seven,” the trailblazing first graduating batch of the Institute of Mass Communication before it became the College of Mass Communication (or Masscom). Even in retirement, she remains put together, articulate, and fiercely attentive to appearances.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. She did not find herself repulsive, she clarified—nothing as dramatic as my phantom encounter. She still dressed carefully, still preened and put on makeup before going out, and still took pride in presenting herself well. She simply no longer took pleasure in what the mirror showed her: the sagging, dull skin, the softer jawline, the eyebags, and the drooping eyelids. Ultimately, she said, she looked properly and truly like a lola.
It struck me then that aging may involve two entirely different experiences. One is pathological: the inability to perceive oneself accurately. The other is perfectly ordinary: perceiving oneself truthfully and not particularly liking the result.
Modern life encourages us to confuse the two.
Body dysmorphia is real and debilitating. But so is ordinary disappointment. So is vanity. So is grief for a younger, fuller face.
What complicates matters today is that we inhabit an era of relentless self-observation. While our ancestors encountered their reflections only occasionally through rare or imperfect mirrors, we now carry front-facing cameras everywhere and spend hours staring at ourselves in video meetings. It is a modern trap where I constantly find my gaze drifting away from my colleagues in the frame to fixate on my own face, searching for lines or shifting to find better lighting. Psychologists note that this prolonged self-view drastically increases appearance-related rumination, breeding a hyper-self-consciousness that is hard to escape when your own reflection dominates the screen.
Beauty standards have constantly shifted—from 1980s aerobics and 1990s waif silhouettes to 2000s celebrity fitness and today’s era of biohacking, injectable enhancements, and “maxxing.” Each generation inherits these amended ideals to measure themselves against. Yet, as time, age, illness, or life inevitably intervene, the standards remain rigidly unchanged while we do, setting us up for disappointment in a game that was never designed to be won.
That is why my aunt’s remark stayed with me rather than any psychological explanations. Ninang Lydia was not describing a disorder. She was merely describing reality. Her reality. And accepting it.
The stranger I glimpsed that morning was neither a medical glitch nor a prophecy. It was simply a trick of morning light, a sleepy brain misassembling familiar parts—or perhaps a waking dream of the anxieties I try to deny but carry all the same.
