The Mirror Archetype: Being Seen Without Being Decided
- Amanda Calendine
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
JANUARY CAME IN SWINGING
Earlier this year, I did a Year Ahead workshop with Kim Krans, the creator of The Wild Unknown Archetype Deck.
I hold deep reverence for this deck, not as a tool I picked up for content or clarity, but as something that entered my life long before my work had a name or a container.
I’ve been in relationship with this deck for about five years now. It whispered to me one afternoon in a metaphysical shop in downtown Dunedin, Florida, and never really let go.
I came to archetypes years ago through an ex studying depth psychology at Pacifica, and even with Jung’s limits, archetypal theory itself felt unmistakably queer—fluid, liminal, resistant to fixed meaning. When I found Kim Krans’ Archetype Deck and saw there wasn’t even a Hero card, I was sold. IYKYK.
So long before Mind Your Queer Business became what it is, these archetypes were already part of my ecosystem, something I returned to for orientation, reflection, and language when things felt unnamed.
The Year Ahead spread pulls one card for each month, with a single center card that holds the theme of the entire year.
The Mirror landed as the archetype for this month and it hasn’t been subtle.
The Mirror has a bad reputation.
It’s easy to think of Narcissus, stuck staring at himself until he disappears. Or Dorian Gray, watching his reflection rot in secret while he stays untouched.
Ego. Vanity. Self-obsession. Surveillance.
The kind of self-awareness that turns into self-policing.
No wonder so many people flinch when the Mirror shows up. I did too.
But the more it’s been circling me, the more I’ve started to wonder if I’ve misplaced the threat.
What if the problem was never the Mirror itself? What if the danger isn’t reflection but what happens when light has nowhere to go?
The Mirror ARchetype (In Shadow)
In its shadow, the Mirror traps.
It loops attention inward with no exit.
It turns curiosity into fixation.
It collapses perspective into a single image and asks that image to carry too much weight.
For me, this hasn’t been theoretical.
There was a long stretch of my life where mirrors weren’t neutral objects.
They were sites of negotiation. Of distortion. Of control. Of avoidance.
During recovery, I learned very deliberately, not to look.
Full avoidance.
No casual glances.
No checking.
No lingering.
The Mirror wasn’t a tool for insight; it was a trigger.
That distance was protective. Necessary.
It kept me present in my recovery while I rebuilt a relationship with my body that wasn’t mediated by judgment.
But avoidance has a cost, too.
When the Mirror is only dangerous, it becomes something to fear rather than something to work with.
And fear, over time, hardens into absence.
A missing relationship.
A refusal to witness what is because of what once was.
This is the Mirror’s shadow that still makes sense to me,
the one that sharpens comparison, feeds dysmorphia, and turns “self-awareness” into self-surveillance. Not vanity. Not ego.
Just too much meaning trapped in a single reflection.
The Mirror Archetype in Light (What I’m Learning to Let Through)
When the Mirror is in light, it doesn’t decide.
It doesn’t flatten me into an image, or a role, or a single version of myself that has to hold forever.
It allows something much more unsettling and much more alive.
It allows becoming.
Being visible without being decided means I don’t have to resolve myself before I show up.
I don’t have to know which version of me is the “real” one.
I don’t have to sand myself down into coherence just to be seen.
The Mirror, in light, doesn’t demand a conclusion. It holds facets.
I can be proud and uncomfortable at the same time.
I can feel the cringe of being seen and the relief of being recognized.
I can want to hide my face and still choose to let it be amplified.
Those things don’t cancel each other out.
That’s the part of the Mirror I’m learning to trust.
The Mirror Archetype in Practice (What I’m Learning from Witnessing)
Mirrors show up in many forms, which makes the Mirror archetype feel a little like the Trickster at times.
It’s not always obvious where the “true” reflection lives.
Becoming a parent is, full stop, like walking through a funhouse of mirrors. There's the mirror that feels most like you, and dozens of others that are distortions, projections, alternate versions that bubble up during dysregulation, milestones, or fear.
My son has been a powerful mirror for me lately as he’s crossed a very real threshold into preschool. And I’ll admit, I might be throwing a little shade here, but we didn’t exactly set ourselves up to trust others with his care. That was part of our own healing journey around fertility, and it also did us very few favors when it came to trusting his ability to stand on his own.
What I’m realizing now is he wasn’t the one incapable of meeting change. It was us. My spouse and I were the ones who had the hardest time loosening our ideas of who he would be, how he would show up, what he might need.
It’s been a humbling reminder that our kids do not owe us anything.
The Mirror has a funny and sometimes not-so-funny—way of showing up in families. Legacy, genetics, childhood experiences, how our parents grew up, what was tended to and what was ignored.
Children so easily become reflections of a parent’s worth, especially when the identities that existed outside the mother or father archetype don’t get care of their own.
When those parts go untended, the mirror gets heavy.
It starts asking children to carry things that were never theirs.
I don’t ever want to reach a place where I assume my son owes me anything—a phone call, a conversation, a version of himself that makes me feel secure in a story I’m telling in that moment.
Instead, I hope to keep listening. To show up in the ways he asks me to, especially as he grows into an adult. And to keep tending my own self outside of being “his Mama,” so the Mirror between us stays relational instead of transactional.
The Mirror Archetype (In Work)
I can see now that the Mirror has been shaping my work for a long time, even before I had language for it.
I resist people telling me who I am.
I resist systems that rush to decide identity.
I resist conclusions that arrive faster than relationship.
That resistance isn’t avoidance. It’s a guardrail.
In my work, I’m far less interested in interpretation than I am in witnessing. In building containers that can hold reflection without flattening it. Spaces where recognition can happen without definition, where someone can see themselves without being collapsed into a single narrative, label, or outcome.
This matters even more in my work with AI.
AI is, at its core, a mirror. A powerful one. It reflects patterns, language, and identity back at us at speed.
Ungoverned, it decides too quickly.
It names.
It concludes.
It turns reflection into authority.
What I’m building instead treats the Mirror as a framework, not a verdict. One that requires pause, consent, and exit points before meaning is made. What matters to me isn’t what a system can show.
It’s how that showing is held.
Where are the pauses?
Where is consent made explicit?
Where does the person get to say no, or not yet, or that doesn’t fit?
A mirror without an exit becomes a trap. A mirror with an exit becomes a threshold.
That distinction between being seen and being decided is the line I keep tending, both in my work and in myself.
The Mirror (In Me): Visibility Without Collapse
This is showing up most clearly for me in how I let myself be seen.
Not just as someone who does work, but as a face.
A voice.
A body attached to the thing I love enough to claim it as a calling.
I still feel resistance to images of myself, to visibility that can be screenshotted, judged, decided. To being reduced to an angle, a frame, a version that someone else might mistake for the whole.
And at the same time, something else has been growing alongside that resistance: a grounded pride. A quiet willingness to say, this matters to me, and to let that mattering be visible.
The Mirror in light lets me be visible without being consumed by the image of myself. It allows me to assert value without turning myself into a product, a brand, or a single story that has to explain everything.
I’m no longer interested in killing the Mirror shadow or pretending it doesn’t exist. I know too well what happens when reflection turns into domination or when visibility starts demanding certainty.
Standing near the Mirror without stepping inside it.
Letting it show me color without asking it to decide me.
Allowing myself to be seen without demanding resolution.
The Mirror in light doesn’t heal by erasing discomfort. It heals by making room.
Room for facets.
Room for contradiction.
Room for becoming without deadlines.
About Amanda — the Entraprenotsure™ behind MYQB. I'm a queer, neurodivergent, recovering perfectionist who built a business out of grief, creativity, and way too many browser tabs. I’m not here to give you a one-size-fits-all formula. I’m here to help amplify your voice, your rhythm, and a way of showing up that feels like you.
I started Mind Your Queer Business for the misfits, the feelers, the overthinkers, and the creatively stubborn—especially those building empires in nap time increments. Around here, we build brands and marketing strategies that actually make sense for who you are, not who the internet told you to be. If you’ve ever felt like entrepreneurship wasn’t built for someone like you, good news: you get to rebuild it.
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