I'm thinking about the relationship between self-portraits and the fact that as humans, we spend our life unable to look at ourselves as we can look at others.

I know my own face far worse than I know the features of others. Noses, eyebrows, smiles, dimples, scars. Our eyes are like lids that open our self to the rest of the world, and they are at this border, the skin, that separates that self, that holds it from spilling out into everything else. We can not physically turn our gaze onto ourselves, we're only aided by mirrors or photos, so we can't gain direct knowledge of our physical selves although we live within that container every second of life.