The journal

The Mirror and the Mask: What the Cost of Survival Taught Me About Professional Presence. ​The first time I remember looking into a mirror and feeling the terrifying weight of absolute erasure, I was seven years old. ​It was an early, suffocatingly quiet morning in Cork. The Irish sky outside was a heavy, slate grey—the kind of damp, suffocating mist that rolls off the River Lee and clings to the concrete, soaking into the red brick of the houses until the whole city feels li