The silver jug unsettles me more this week than the strawberries console me.
At first glance, the painting appears serene: three strawberries resting in ripeness, quail’s eggs sealed in potential, porcelain bowl luminous against darkness. But the true center is the jug. Its convex surface gathers the room into itself and bends it. The window fractures into geometry. The table elongates. The artist stands within it present, yet warped.
It is a faithful distortion.
What I cannot ignore is that the reflection is not false. The artist truly stands there. The room truly exists. The light truly falls as rendered. The jug does not invent; it refracts. The curvature belongs to the vessel, not the subject.
This has been my experience of the past weeks.
Applications compress decades into bullet points. Cover letters flatten vocation into paragraphs. Interviews reduce narrative identity to timed responses beneath fluorescent light. Then comes the emails: measured, procedural, final. “Not the right fit.” “Lacking experience.” “Overqualified.” “Too negative.” The language is precise, almost polished. It carries institutional authority. It feels like truth.
It feels like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror.
The temptation is to dismiss the distortion entirely, to insist that they do not see me. But relational existence does not allow that luxury. We do not construct identity in isolation. Charles Horton Cooley described the self as emerging through the “looking-glass” of others’ perceptions. George Herbert Mead deepened this claim: we become who we are by taking the role of the other toward ourselves. Even Hegel insisted that recognition is necessary for self-conscious freedom. To be seen is to be formed and informed.
If multiple rooms read my candor as negativity, that perception carries weight. Social reality is co-constructed. Perception shapes opportunity. It opens or closes doors. In that sense, perception creates reality not metaphysically, but institutionally.
The jug’s reflection matters.
But it is not total.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us that perception is always situated. Every vantage point is embodied and partial. The jug curves because of its structure. The hiring committee sees through its own structure: time constraints, internal politics, risk aversion, cultural preference for optimism over complexity. They encounter not my life but my presentation within their frame.
The distortion, then, is neither pure illusion nor ultimate truth. It is relationally conditioned truth.
This is the more difficult position to inhabit. It requires humility without collapse. It requires asking: What in my presentation produces this reading? Where might honesty harden into severity? Where does intellectual seriousness and critical positionality register as negativity? These questions are not self-erasure; they are acts of refinement.
And yet there remains something irreducible.
The strawberries in Brown’s painting are not reflective surfaces. They do not mediate the room. They receive light and hold their form. Their redness is unapologetic, saturated, immediate. They will bruise. They will decay. But in this moment, they are fully themselves.
Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between idem identity, sameness that can be described, measured, evaluated, and ipse identity, the deeper narrative selfhood that persists across change. Institutions judge the former. They assess competencies, experience, fit. But the latter—my continuity as teacher, builder of programs, companion to students navigating loss and redemption—cannot be exhausted by evaluative language.
Rejection threatens narrative coherence. It introduces fracture. I begin to wonder whether the distorted image is more authoritative than my lived history. The mind is quick to internalize the curve. If enough reflections bend in the same direction, one begins to feel permanently warped.
But the painting resists that conclusion. The distortion is visible precisely because the surrounding objects are rendered with clarity. We can trace the curvature. We can see the physics of it. The artist paints herself within the jug not to correct the distortion, but to acknowledge it. She stands there, small yet undeniable.
Perhaps this season is less about advancement and more about recognition in its most difficult form: misrecognition. Hegel argued that recognition unfolds through struggle. It is not immediate or symmetrical. It emerges dialectically, through conflict and revision. To be misunderstood is not to be erased; it is to be caught within process.
The deeper question presses harder: Is my vocation dependent upon being accurately perceived? Or can it persist even when refracted? If leadership is an extension of who I am, then it must be durable enough to survive temporary misalignment between perception and essence.
The jug reflects according to its form. I present according to mine. Institutions evaluate according to theirs. Reality is forged through encounter.
I cannot deny that others’ perceptions contain some truth. They reveal how I land in particular rooms. They shape what becomes possible. But they do not define the entirety of my being. They are angles, not absolutes.
The strawberries still glow.
Their ripeness is not contingent upon approval. They exist fully under light, aware of perishability yet unbent by reflection. Perhaps that is the discipline before me: not to reject the curve, not to internalize it uncritically, but to hold steady in the light that reveals both distortion and integrity.
I am, in part, who others see.
I am also more than any surface can contain.