The Country That Forgot Its Reflection
A field report on dissociation, mythmaking, and the American psyche
Filed under: National Dissociation & Other American Pastimes
The mirror remembers what the country refuses to see.
There’s a strange moment in every horror film when the creature finally glimpses itself in a mirror—
a shudder of recognition, a recoil, a flicker of something ancient stirring beneath the skin.
That moment never arrives for America.
We are a nation that broke its own mirror out of self-preservation,
a country wandering through the house with the lights off,
refusing to look directly at the thing it has become
because looking requires remembering.
And remembering is the one thing we seem constitutionally incapable of doing.
I. Amnesia as a National Pastime
If you listen closely—past the fireworks, past the punditry, past the algorithm humming like a tired god— you can hear the faint rustle of a country misplacing its memories.
We forget the lessons we never fully learned.
We forget the wounds we never allowed to scar.
We forget the names of those we buried, the rights we surrendered in moments of fear, the quiet bargains we made with cruelty to keep our comfort intact.
Amnesia is not accidental here; it is curated.
It’s a strategy.
It’s a shield held up against the unbearable truth that every empire dies,
and all of them begin to rot from the inside first.
We are, in every psychological sense, a patient waking up with no idea how the blood got on the floor.
II. The Dissociated Union
There is the America we perform—shiny, triumphant, always “the greatest.”
There is the America we export—heroic narratives wrapped in Hollywood lighting.
And then there is the America we hide, trembling in the hallway:
The one that cages families
and calls it “deterrence.”
The one that mistakes cruelty for strength
and fear for patriotism.
The one that feels the ground shifting
and decides to build higher walls
instead of deeper roots.
Carl Jung warned that whatever we reject in ourselves returns as fate.
Nations are no different.
When a society represses its shadow long enough,
the shadow begins to govern.
We live now in the space between selves—
a fractured psyche staggering under its own contradictions.
A country in a dissociative fugue,
performing normalcy while something darker paces just out of view.
III. Innocence as a National Delusion
There is a particular kind of myth that only powerful nations tell themselves:
the myth of inherent goodness.
Not earned goodness.
Not practiced goodness.
Inherent.
A purity narrative so deeply stitched into our identity
that any attempt to hold a mirror is treated as treason.
We are taught from a young age that America is always the protagonist.
Always the liberator.
Always the chosen one in the cosmic script.
But a nation that believes itself incapable of wrongdoing
is a nation incapable of repentance.
And a nation incapable of repentance
is a nation incapable of change.
Innocence makes us blind.
Blindness makes us dangerous.
IV. The Fog Between What We Are and What We Claim to Be
There is a fog settling over the American ethos—
not the kind that obscures truth,
but the kind that softly erases it.
We scroll past atrocities with the same thumb we use to like a dog video.
We ration outrage like electricity in a blackout.
We normalize the grotesque because naming it would require action,
and action would require risk,
and risk would require admitting that things are not fine
and have not been fine for a very long time.
It is surreal to live in a country where the extraordinary horror
has started to masquerade as the ordinary day.
Sometimes I think we’re all standing in the same burning room,
debating whether the smoke is an inconvenient weather pattern.
V. The Mirror We Refuse to Build
The hardest truth is this:
America does not lack the ability to self-reflect.
It lacks the willingness.
Self-reflection requires humility.
Humility requires accountability.
Accountability requires change.
And change terrifies a nation that built an entire mythology
on the illusion of immutable greatness.
But the mirror is coming whether we build it or not.
History is a patient archivist; it collects our contradictions with quiet diligence.
You can only run from your reflection for so long
before it learns to run faster.
VI. So How Do We Live Here—Inside the Dissociation?
There is no tidy ending.
No patriotic bow to smooth over the fracture.
But there is a path, and it is small and human and stubbornly bright.
We must become the mirror for each other.
We must remember when the country forgets.
We must speak plainly when institutions lie poetically.
We must name the wounds others would camouflage as “policy.”
We must keep the collective memory warm
so it does not slip back into the cold of forgetting.
And above all:
we must refuse to surrender our humanity
to a nation that sometimes treats humanity as a negotiable asset.
VII. The Reflection We Deserve
A country is not its government.
It is not its corporations.
It is not its myths or slogans or televised fantasies.
A country is the accumulation of ordinary people
making extraordinarily difficult choices
in a time when forgetting is easy
and remembering is rebellion.
Maybe the mirror we fear isn’t a verdict.
Maybe it’s an invitation.
To grow up.
To wake up.
To stop worshipping the myth of what we were
and begin shaping the truth of what we could still become.
America has forgotten its reflection.
But we have not.
And we are not done ringing the bell.
Until the mirror returns,
—Rebecca M. Bell
P.S.
Memory is the last form of resistance.
Hold onto it with both hands.
Filed under: National Dissociation & Other American Pastimes