February 14, 2026

I Buried My Face

I DID NOT PERCEIVE MYSELF FOR A MONTH, AND THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED

ON BOREDOM AND ITS SOLUTIONS

There is a magical place on an island fourteen hours away from a bigger island in the South Pacific, where you can find a woman named Mary. I found her at a time when I was confused and alone, which are two feelings quite alien to her existence, and I suspect this is why she became very fond of me.

One afternoon, we sat in the shade of a tangled jungle full of old rain trees big as six-storey buildings, exhausted by a day of collecting guava and dodging vines coiled like phone cords. She was recounting to me her tumultuous love story with a man called Bill, which was one of my favourite things to ask her about.

Mary is a Fijian woman, and because of our language barrier, we both had to navigate a kind of creative verbal poverty. She is really good at saying profound things very simply. We giggled as she described a fight she and Bill had years ago, and how she caught him in his infidelity. She caught him “doing Big Sex in bed”, and so she threatened him by saying,

“I’ll bury your face over there”.

This is a fantastic sentence on its own. But it especially struck me because, unbeknownst to Mary, I actually had been burying my face over there.

Literally. I was living in an isolated shack with no reception, and for the last month, I had not perceived myself. I succeeded in this regard. For thirty days, I did not look at my face. All I saw of myself was my limbs. I was getting away with it, too. Mary did think it was strange that I had covered all my mirrors with old shirts, but she wasn’t concerned.

The shack was pushed up against a wall of green and blue. The morning tide came close to my bed, and insects chanted in the trees at night. The only chance I had of getting internet was atop a tall hill, which was used only a few times; one such instance was during an electrical storm at night.

I sustained the life force of approximately three million mosquitoes in that shack. Crab sternums strung up with fishing line would knock against each other in the breeze, and giant geckos would launch themselves around the room, making slapping noises with their skin and the walls. Overripe pineapples on either side of my bed masked the damp smell radiating from my mattress, and on my foot was a word that wasn’t there a few weeks ago. The word “Lovedream” had been scratched into it by a man in a garage in Nadi.

The compulsion to look at oneself is in all of us. At any given moment, a stranger with strong feelings and wifi connection can access you. Something about this never felt right. To me, it feels like our brains might not be equipped to process ourselves. I was right.

A very short lesson in the phenomenology of mirrors:

The year this article is written marks the 190th anniversary of mirrors being readily available to the masses (Justus von Liebig invented the silvered-glass mirror, the same one we use today, in 1835).

Until terrifyingly recently in the human story, perceiving oneself was something that had to be done outside, by a body of water or maybe, maybe, in a piece of polished obsidian if you were a seer of noble blood in Mesopotamia. Society doesn’t talk about this enough. The same society drunk on peddling its return to what is ‘natural’ - a return to the paleo, carnivorous, trad-wifery nonsense, doesn’t ever mention a mirror-less existence- a status that defined the majority of our time as a species.

If time is the criterion, if simply participating in our evolution for a longer period of time deems something as more legitimate, or more ‘natural’ to humanity, here are some stats for you:

It is 26 times more natural to write, than to look in the mirror.

It is 52 times more natural to eat grain, than to look in the mirror.

It is 39 times more natural to drink wine than it is to look in the mirror.

I was a drunk writer without reception who didn’t look into her own eyes for thirty days - making me one of the most natural things on earth. The numbers don’t lie.

Anyone who has eaten enough psychedelics knows that mirrors and phones are out of bounds. To me, this aversion seems less a symptom of my widening retinas and more a message from the Cosmic Teacher Herself to not partake in such liberties.

I wanted to subject my emotional history to a thorough re-evaluation. I wanted to try an organic life with a brain, which, anthropologically speaking, is a life without mirrors. I wanted to see if something inside me might change. The prospect of being stranded without anybody -even myself- excited me, and so I went to the shack. I went there to be alone. And I was given Mary. And so I was the least lonely person on earth.

For Mary, the world is an obstacle course. She doesn’t need anything but the earth and some mischief. She fishes with a roll of line, sometimes three times a day, in an old wooden boat which she paddles to a reef. She is out there looking for an emperor. The red one. She would greet me in the morning with fish scales dancing off her sulu like sequins.

One morning, I asked her why she hadn’t been out, to which she replied, “I need this thing to go down more”.

She was pointing at the sky. She was talking about the sun. She masturbates on the reef at low tide to cure urchin injuries. She is having way more fun than anyone else.

What happened inside my mind that month is hard to describe—such is the nature of tropical knowledge. It exists beyond thought. It is a hot memory that wobbles the further away it gets.

How fortunate Newton was to have lived in an orchard-bearing climate. Here, in the tropics- the coconut-bearing (!) tropics- his enlightenment would have been fatal.

Which makes me believe that Pacific Islanders knew about gravity -and everything else- way before anyone else. There are clues of this everywhere. The mystery in everything, the spells, the complete disregard for metrics of time, the laughter, always. The existence of Mary is a big clue. When I first arrived, I had a very real sense that my heart had forgotten something hers still remembered.

Everyone expects something profound when I tell them what I did. I discovered nothing profound. I didn’t have a cerebral revolution. I discovered there are 22 prongs on my comb. I discovered a thorn in my right foot (twice). I discovered (the hard way) that my battery terminal looks like a piece of coral; it is so calcified. I discovered how perfect it is that we call it a ‘hand’ of bananas.

Mostly, my time was just spent in awe of the splendid marriage of design and ritual that is lighting mosquito coils and placing them in shells to burn off. I became fixated on it. I made a private religion of shells and citronella.

I think radical mindfulness might include a species of boredom. And the greatest threat to boredom is a mirror. Or worse—a mirror that talks back. My phone.

On any given day, I see more images before breakfast than a person in the 19th century would have seen in an entire lifetime. I sometimes find myself recounting the days of yore to the youth, describing the primitive and carnal frontier of the web. I say things like, “I was the first generation to survive the morning of the internet.”

It was an unfettered orgy of vulgarity, violence, and conceit. It was eight seconds long (vine). It was Omegle, jihadist beheadings, and #f4f. It was not just a surface—it was a mirror, too clear and held too close.

It was meant to be a space of education and revolution. Instead, we just used it to exploit each other and adore ourselves (which speaks to a broader understanding of freedom and what humans tend to do with it).

If what they say is true, that we are what we eat, in a whole world that eats with its eyes, then we are cannibalising ourselves. We are eating ourselves until there is nothing left.

At the risk of sounding puritanical, I will reiterate that the ‘we’ I am slandering includes ‘I’. I use the internet to spy on myself through the eyes of others. I tell myself cute stories like I’m only on here for my friends and um information and um connection.

All my brain has to show for my month without myself are thoughts of Mary. I think of her at least once a day. I wonder what she’s doing right now. Probably using washed-up bits of plastic to start a fire. Or she’s whistling a tune, scraping some husks. She’s kicking a coconut out of the way. She’s hitching a ride into town with her cousin (anyone with a car).

The truth is that when I finally looked in the mirror, after peeling the mould-blackened shirt off its surface, I saw nothing new. Not a stranger, not a jumble of facial features. Just me, again.

But this new me could light mosquito coils without burning the tip of her thumbs, and when she does, she whispers, “take care of me”, like a witch circumnavigated by smouldering clam shells. She fills up the ice tray with love in her heart. She knows which guava will be the sweetest before she tastes it.