'I Hate All Photos of Myself And I Can't Seem to Get Over It!'
It's time to switch things up. SWITCH IT THE FUCK UP, ISLANDERS!
Fernande’s Head (1906), Pablo Picasso
Dear Polly,
I know a lot of people are camera shy, but for me, it’s extreme. I’m middle-aged and have struggled with this my entire life. Seeing a photo of myself can send me spiraling into depression for days. Being asked to pose for a photo is deeply uncomfortable.
I’m okay with mirrors. I don’t love the way I look, but I’m resigned to it. I’m used to it. But the way I look in photos is so vastly different from my internal self-image, it throws my entire self-concept into disarray.
People don’t run for the hills or brandish torches at me — they generally respond to me as if I’m pleasant looking. I even get compliments from strangers sometimes, usually about the way I dress, or my hair (which amazes me, because I am constantly at war with my hair).
I do currently feel fat, but I know this is not about weight. I know this because, as a child in the seventies, I was ashamed of being too skinny. I was also the tallest kid in every class. I felt so, so much shame about my height. I was embarrassed at being too skinny, but being too tall felt deeply shameful to me. It felt like my fault that my body was wrong. Because of my freakish height (I felt) no one would ever love me, I would be an outcast, and my life would be ruined.
And everyone let me know it! “Why are you so tall?” was a question I got asked frequently by rude strangers, well into my twenties.
Polly, I am a six-foot-tall woman. That’s not even that tall by today’s standards, at least not on the West Coast, where I have lived since the nineties.
Speaking of the nineties, the grunge era was good for me. I loved grunge. I embraced being a underemployed, sloppy slacker. I didn’t feel gender dysphoria, but what I did feel, for my entire life up to that point, was that I had failed at performing femininity correctly. It was a relief to give up for a while.
Now I must talk about my mother and how I was raised. You knew it was coming.
I love my mom! She’s a very kind and caring person. She’s funny and fun, and I feel lucky that she is thriving in old age. She has lots of friends, and is healthy and physically active. She survived a traumatic childhood, and I know that being a good mom was (and is) very important to her. She would do just about anything for me and my sister.
She’s also obsessed with physical appearance. In the eighties, we watched Joan Rivers as a family, laughing together at her brutal jokes about “ugly” celebrities.
Her ideas about beauty are conservative: Anyone unique is ugly. Beauties are thin, blonde, and conventional. Think Grace Kelly. She is impressed by beauty, as if it’s an achievement. She is critical of what she perceives as ugliness, like it’s a moral failure.
The weird thing is, my mom, my whole family, is fairly average-looking. We’re fine, but we’re not anything to write home about. But her highest values have always been beauty and genius. It was always very important to her that her children were understood to be beautiful geniuses.
She has incessantly told me I am beautiful my entire life, but held up examples that didn’t look like me. To the extent I am attractive at all, it’s not in a conventional way. She wholly rejects unconventional beauty.
My sister — naturally blonde, normal height — came closer to her ideals. But even she was pressured into getting a nose job at age 17 by my mother! (A very bad memory and still a source of shame for me: I regret not trying harder to stop it, and I am sad that it happened.)
I’m also not a genius. My sister comes closer to that metric as well. I think I am smart, and I always loved writing and art, but…I’m not really the academic type. I didn’t particularly excel in school. I’ve always had a “B is good enough, right?” kind of mindset. Despite this, growing up, I heard over and over again that I was a genius.
I think this had the unfortunate effect of making me give up too easily. I felt discouraged whenever I wasn’t immediately good at something (which is many, many things) and had no concept (until I figured it out much later) that you could actually pursue something you liked whether or not you excelled at it. And you could get better!
I believe her intentions are good. I think she believes that by repeating these stories— that I am beautiful, that I am a genius — she is protecting me from something. But what? The truth of who I really am?
The thing is, insisting on false stories doesn’t make them true. Hearing them over and over just makes me feel sad and unseen. In fixating on qualities that I don’t have, I feel she underappreciates the good qualities that I do have.
I have lots of good qualities! I’m not beautiful, but I’m charismatic and well-liked. Despite my weird, janky teeth, I’ve been told that my smile lights up the room.
I’m not a genius, but I am creative and fun. I’m not an academic achiever, but I’m verbal and outgoing, and I can make people laugh. I have a job that I like, that pays well and has good work/life balance. I’m childless by choice, but I’m a great cat mom!
My anguish around all this has resurfaced recently because of something good that happened. I finally, after decades of avoiding it, tapped into my creative side that longed to write and make art, but was always too scared to put myself out there. I submitted some visual art and it was accepted into a gallery show! I submitted some creative writing, and won a short story contest! And I had a poem and another story accepted to a literary magazine!
These were small wins, but for me, they are huge. I’d never dared to share my work before. To take creative risks and actually experience success is a big deal for me.
But right after my poem was accepted, I was asked to submit an author photo, and that’s when I realized I only have one single photograph of myself that I like. And it was taken ten years and 25 pounds ago. I mean, I’ll submit it anyway! I have to. But it’s literally the only photo I like, and I was lucky to find it (my husband eventually unearthed it on his phone). Since I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding cameras, there aren’t many photos of me.
Speaking of my husband, he has helped my confidence in a lot of ways. Since he is crazy and has terrible taste (kidding — sort of), he thinks I’m beautiful. I’m sure he helped me feel better about my height, too. He’s five feet nine to my six feet, and he’s always praised my tallness. He also (slowly, over time) encouraged me to reclaim parts of my femininity, but in ways that feel more natural to me. Over time, I started having fun with my personal style, integrating skirts, dresses and make-up into my look, but in ways that feel like “me.”
I can’t pinpoint exactly when the miracle happened.
The miracle: At some point, my shame about my height just fell away. I don’t feel bad about it anymore, even when I hear a negative comment (which still occasionally happens, though not nearly as often). One of the gifts of getting older? (Why do so many people feel that they can openly tell young women what they think of their appearance, positive or negative? But I digress…)
Whatever. At this point in my life, when it comes to my height, I am all out of fucks. Not one single thing bothers me about it anymore. Even a direct insult — which would have devastated me in the past — rolls right off, and even makes me laugh.
But whenever I have to pose for a photo, I still feel so uncomfortable and distressed. I only agree to pose for photos for friends, who know better than to ever show them to me. If I accidentally see a photo of myself, I’m liable to spiral into a depth of body dysmorphia that can persist for days, destroying all my hard-won self-confidence.
I’ve tried avoidance. This works to a large extent, except in my current situation where my shame about submitting a profile photo overshadows my joy at being published. I also tried taking a lot of selfies and forcing myself to look at them, a sort of “flooding” approach. It didn’t work. I just got sad and stayed sad, and never could get to a place where I felt okay about it.
What do I do? Go to my grave hating photos of myself? As I age, I fear that I am going to acquire more reasons to feel bad about how I look. My hope is for a miracle, like what happened with my height — for this aversion to just drop away one day, and for the part of my brain that cares to permanently burn out.
Over the summer, I went on a trip with my husband and mother-in-law. My husband wanted a photo of us — of course, he knows about my issue, but he still likes to have photos of me – so he asked my mother-in-law to take one. I agreed because I was trying to be a good sport. I tried so hard to smile, to look happy, to not look as uncomfortable as I felt — but then my mother-in-law called out to me: “Suck in your stomach, Nancy!”
My husband was furious. I pretended it didn’t matter. Anyway: that happened.
I think that’s everything! I’m so curious if you have any advice. I love the way your writing lights up parts of my brain that I didn’t even know were there. I have learned about insecure attachment, a concept that I now think about a lot. I’ve learned how to consider my issues in new ways, in a kinder light. I’m hoping you might offer a fresh take on this that somehow allows for inspiration or hope.
But even if such a thing is not possible (and it may not be) thank you SO MUCH, Polly, for listening, and for your column which has already given so much. I love your writing, I love your heart, I love your work, and I love your light which you always share so generously with us, your dedicated readers.
Thanks for everything you do!
Love,
Photo Shy, Tall & Dysmorphic
Dear PSTD,
Well, unfortunately, I’m not convinced that you’re not a beautiful genius.
Disinterest in academics and making the choice to stop at a B both signal independence and intelligence to me. You didn’t feel connected to what you were learning in school. You felt bored. So you made your own decision about how much it should matter.
Hating photos often means that the force of your magnetism isn’t reflected in flat images of you. You know that you’re charismatic and attractive in person, in motion, but these elements have never been captured in a photograph.
Many people are beautiful but not at all photogenic. This sounds like an excuse when someone is reassuring you about a terrible photo, but it’s actually just a fact. I have friends who can’t take a bad picture and friends who can’t take a good one, and often the bad-photo ones are the alarmingly sexy ones. People with interesting facial features, cool angles to their jaws, bold noses, expressive smiles, and asymmetrical eyes are often much more enticing than average, predictable-looking people in person, but in photographs they look like Picasso’s Cubist paintings.
You’ve probably tried to make your own private decision about how attractive you are (reasonably! whatever!) and how much looks should matter (not much at all!) the way you did about school. But somehow your mother’s words still live inside your skull and also in the cells of your body.
This is true because, outside of her distorted views around appearances, your mother’s assessments are wise and can be trusted. It made no sense that she was a good person, grounded, helpful, generous, and also thought of unique-looking people as less valuable than good-looking people. It’s also true because, as you explained, her ideas about looks were more like morals. She had a value system around appearances that she couldn’t overturn and didn’t question.
Even though these are mostly generational differences, they point to a layer of rigidity in your mother that you can’t challenge or disrupt. On the surface and in her interactions with you, she is loving and flexible. Beneath the surface, she has harsh judgments that are iron-clad and irreproachable.
This is true because she had to live on her own island in order to survive her childhood. You know her very well and you were raised partially on her island, so some aspects of that island culture are alive inside you, whether you want them to be or not.
You also lived on your own island in order to handle the idiotic ways of the mainland. (“Tallness is bad!” lol I mean wtf?) You decided that academic subjects didn’t have much to do with you, and working hard was for nerds like your sister but not for you. Because your mother had such a brutal classification system (Pretty blonde good, odd brunette bad), you developed your own brutal filing systems without realizing it. Caring about looks at all became a mortal sin. Improving on how you look is superficial and stupid. Showing up absolutely AS YOU ARE became heroic and daring.
But now that you’ve finally crawled out from under the giant rock of “TALL BAD!”, your cells are telling you that you care about looks more than you ever did. In fact, maybe you always NATURALLY cared, the same way you naturally cared about writing and art but didn’t believe that a person could develop new talents and skills at any moment in life.
In other words, you are quite organically starting to question some of the cultural traditions of your OWN INVENTED ISLAND for the first time. And unfortunately, some of those traditions are echoes of your mother’s island culture. Why wouldn’t they be? They served as protection from your mother’s brutal, rigid worldview, but you were young and half-formed so parts of your traditions and ideas were also OUTCROPPINGS or VARIATIONS on your mother’s worldview.
And that’s some GENIUS SHIT for sure. But American culture hates intelligence so much that we pathologize how it feels to be smart. Instead of talking openly about the fact that smart people get bored easily and change their minds a lot and get curious about new things all the time, we treat intelligence like it’s some depressing curse and treat aggressively ignorant simpletons like thought leaders.
So take a little time and study the value system, culture, and economy of your island, and you’ll start to recognize how often you block your truest desires and sensations in the present due to some intensely moral notions of what it’s right and wrong TO FUCKING FEEL AT ALL.
Personally, my island exported cleverness and jokes and adorable know-nothing antics, and distrusted most of the imports arriving from far away lands. I didn’t charge enough for my exports so I was always running a trade deficit. And even though we sang songs on my island about the power of never showering and the stupidity of trends, I secretly believed that one day I would be crowned the supreme leader of the planet, a joke-cracking queen of all the land, beautiful and eminently lovable. Even when I was avoiding or giving up, I still wanted other people to find me BEWILDERINGLY CHARMING AND ATTRACTIVE. I set my sights very high, and I could, because I lived alone on an island. I could focus all of the customs and the local media on whatever I (secretly and even subconsciously) valued.
Your island is far from the mainland, too. You treat other people’s words as untrustworthy (“She’s just saying that because she’s my mom.” “He’s just saying that because he’s my husband and his view is warped and crazy.”) You have your own stories about everything. One of your firmest stories, “I AM TOO TALL AND IT’S BAD,” fell away easily. So you’re upset that your other story, “I AM SECRETLY HIDEOUS AND NO ONE WILL ADMIT IT,” continues to keep its hold on you.
These problems are inherent to island culture. You put so much effort into ignoring input that the opinions of others take on an almost mythical status, and are mostly just invented inside your head. This is why creating a reactionary culture is always problematic! Just look around you! In order to believe, you have to live separate from reality, inside a fantasy.
So in many ways, your anger at your mother is a manifestation of your fears about your own reactionary and rigid compensations. You have iron-clad beliefs that echo the reductive nature of “PRETTY BLONDE LADY MORE VALUABLE, MORE SPECIAL!” And as long as you’re counteracting or compensating, avoiding or attacking, you’re living on uneven, shaky ground.
There are more layers to dig through here. But I want to stop us from doing more today, because even if we become anthropologists of all of these island cultures and trace every influence back to its prehistoric roots, we’re just going to feel more wound up and moralistic about which beliefs are wholesome and which are good and worthy. In fact, the essential GOOD and BAD labeling system is the one thing we have to lose forever. Because we are humans and we believe many contradictory things. We feel many contradictory ways. And we are constantly changing.
Let’s stop categorizing and recording, documenting and analyzing, and just GO FOR A SWIM THROUGH THE WARM WATERS. As simple as her weird ideas can be, your mother remains largely unknowable and complex. You are unknowable and complex. People say and do the wrong things every day. All we can do is keep fucking up and keep forgiving each other. All we can do is show up and enjoy what’s here.
In order to enjoy your recent successes, I think you need to make a concrete effort to get one good photo of your face. It doesn’t have to look good to you at all, in the end, you just have to GET IT DONE. You need a real photographer and a make-up artist and hair stylist. Invest the money. This photograph will be the one you use for the next 5-10 years.
You will hate this suggestion and you’ll be sure that it won’t work. That’s island culture. Reality is that people do this all the time, and it does work just fine.
You will say that this goes against your values. Can you delineate what those values are, again? Let’s see, you hate superficial efforts to look good and hate how much other people value looks but you also… fall to pieces when you see a shitty photo of yourself? In other words, you care about how you look a lot. So let’s spend a small stack of bills and one day of your time in support of this unfortunate buried desire of yours, and afterwards, we can BURY IT AGAIN if that feels better!
ISLANDERS love absolutes so much. We think they keep us safe. We are highly moralistic about EVERYTHING. So anytime we simply say “Okay I’ll do the opposite of what I usually do!” we are automatically on firmer ground than we were before.
Get off your island and go for a swim. One photo can change a lot. I have one photo I took years ago that still tricks me into thinking I’m beautiful. I recommend it.
That doesn’t mean you should be attached to any one outcome. This experiment will not fail if you end up with zero good photos. The experience of investing in good headshots is worthy in and of itself. This is you letting go of the myths and rituals of your island in order to simply swim.
Once you’ve completed that assignment, I want you to look into other ways to get off your island and swim. Any time you try something new without being rigidly attached to stories about what it all means, you are swimming. Any time you refuse to form reality from stories inside your head, and let reality be whatever it is that day, you swim. Every time you say “I don’t know, I guess I’ll find out,” you’re floating effortlessly.
When you float, or swim, you sometimes feel unsafe. But you’re fine.
I think you have a serious guilt complex around your gifts. You feel special in some ways but you’re not allowed to admit it. You hate things that announce SPECIALNESS and you love things that are kind of sloppy and low-key and understated. You want to kind of slide in without being noticed. You like to live a LURKY life. But you’ve also been raised by someone who loves spotlight and glamour and specialness and who loved you with that kind of sparkly fire that feels a little too hot but it still matters, it has weight, it molded you.
You don’t trust it but you also love it dearly. That’s a very conflicted feeling at your core.
So it’s not just the self-presentation and the images demanded by your newfound success that are throwing you off. It’s the attention itself. You hate to be that person who says, “I AM HERE, LOOK AT ME!” There’s shame in the mix. You feel jittery about taking up space. You want to hide. Your reactionary island culture says that standing out is immoral.
Now it’s time to admit that all of these stories are stupid. Every single myth, every impression, every bit of feedback about your height, every word of encouragement and also the words “Suck in your gut!” from your mother-in-law. The expensive photographs you eventually pay for will be stupid and your ideas about how you look in that photograph will be ridiculous and who fucking cares? The last thousand or so words I’ve written? Meaningless and such a waste of all of our energy.
Bear with me, we’re swimming here! What other people see when they look at you is UNKNOWABLE. What other people think of you, feel about you? Unknowable. The stories that other people tell about you, the ways their outlooks shift and change, the various psychosocial reasons for their feelings and perspectives: A permanent mystery. We can take a stab at knowing, but because we will never truly know, we are only creating myths when we do this. Even when someone says, “You are X” or “You are Y” or “Let me be honest with you, you’ve always been Z but I think ABC”? Those words must be leavened by what we already know about that person. There is no objective report available to us.
This is why we create our own stories and myths about what other people are thinking. But these stories and myths are ALSO mostly inaccurate, and even if they aren’t, they don’t add up to anything weighty or useful.
Creating myths kept us alive when we were young, and also when we were going through hard times or needed to get motivated and romantic about what might come next. Telling stories kept us safe when we were hurt. Distrusting other lands kept us glued together when we were afraid and no one was there to soothe us. We learned to soothe ourselves. We learned to make ourselves feel safe and important and loved.
But at some point all of that storytelling also warps us, makes us more neurotic and anxious, won’t allow us to unwind and relax and live a little. At this moment in your life, I think you have to do battle with more than just “I AM UGLY IN PHOTOS. I think you have to do battle with I KNOW THE TRUTH BEHIND WHAT EVERYONE ELSE SAYS. I think you have to take a battle axe to “I CAN’T TRUST THESE WORDS” and “I CAN’T EVEN LOOK AT THIS PICTURE” and “I’VE ALWAYS HATED THIS AND I ALWAYS WILL.”
It will feel unsafe and weird, I get that. It will take a long time to dig through these stories. I am not done with all of my stories. They creep back in whenever I feel lonely or lost. It’s a slow process to give up mythmaking after decades of it!
And I still need my island. I need the fat, juicy fruits hanging from savage trees, and the insects big enough to carry away a handbag dog. I need to sometimes insist on my own version of events, just for nostalgic self-soothing and also creative purposes. I need to believe that I am secretly the queen of the entire universe already, even though I am just a potato-headed motherfucker in every selfie I’ve ever taken.
I’ve still made progress in busting up my myths, even though it sometimes hurts and then feels empty, to stand in the middle of my big office and remind myself that I am not that special and no one really finds me that alluring or clever anymore and I have to work very fucking hard to make anything interesting happen, even now, even today, after all these years of hard work.
Busting up my myths has a single, important use: It makes it possible to enjoy the life I have. Whether I’m a potato-headed loser or a goddess, I am here. Whether all of my friends think I’m a dipshit or a gem, I keep inviting them to talk to me and spend time with me. Whether my husband is a confused freak or a rational adult who loves me because I am lovable, I keep telling him the whole truth about how I feel and what I’m struggling with. No matter how things go with anyone in my life, no matter how people react to this column, no matter what happens to my writing career, I am here to squeeze every last ounce of joy from each day.
So I experiment. I overdo it. I sign up for things that are sure to annoy me. I show up for stuff that taxes me. I have new plans, new paradigms, new projects. I am unknowable. The future is uncertain. I am here to enjoy all of it.
In order to swim, you have to reject the questions themselves: Are you secretly beautiful or disgustingly unattractive? What do these words mean? Are you talented or middling? Compared to whom, according to which rules? Are you a genius or an imposter? What will the photos reveal? What will people think of your published work? Are you GOOD or BAD? What strange, fearful soul invented these measurements?
You might not be able to write these things off entirely, but you CAN notice that there are never definitive answers, and whatever clues exist change constantly. Looking for evidence to support one thesis or another is about as worthwhile as declaring I AM GORGEOUS and then pretending that you are. Any approach is exactly as valuable as any other approach, in other words, when it comes to the unknowable. So the real solution lies here: WHAT WOULD BE THE MOST FUN?
Personally, I feel kind of offensively ugly lately, but I also feel indifferent about making an effort. What if I make “Everyone wants me” my new mantra this summer? What if you do? We will feel very foolish, of course. Feeling like a fucking idiot might be fun, though. I’ve been watching this woman on “Love Island Australia” reapply her lipgloss five times per episode, and even though she is very hot, every single time she reapplies it, she becomes more hideous to me. (She’s also very mean so that’s helping.) What if we both buy lip gloss and reapply it constantly while telling ourselves we are goddesses? How will that feel?
I know half the people reading this are thinking, “Huh?” But some of you are thinking, “Hold on, I could try this. Would something break loose? Do I feel guilty and ashamed just thinking about this, and if so, what’s THAT about?”
Switch it up, motherfuckers. That’s all I’m saying. Let go of your myths and SWITCH IT THE FUCK UP.
So that’s what I want you to do, PSTD. Write down some actions that are the opposite of what you normally do. Try some new things. Commit to not telling stories about what happens as a result. Commit to just watching and being amused at how you feel and what goes down. Don’t explain your choices. Commit to daring without justification.
Commit to experimenting, and enjoying whatever occurs, even when it’s very different from what you expected. Welcome whatever comes next. That’s the most important lesson offered by your hatred of photos: You’re ready to detach from set outcomes. You’re hungry for a new way of living. Once you surrender to the unknown and bask in the unknowable, passion and delight will bubble up everywhere. You will be amazed!
This is what very old stories and repeating island myths block from our lives: new sensations and experiences that don’t cohere with our longstanding narratives. When we drop our stories, we get to feel curious about who we really are again. We can break free of our old assumptions and live in the moment.
Will it be a disaster?
All the better.
Because each day you spend trying to control what’s uncontrollable and know what’s unknowable is the biggest disaster of all. You darken every horizon with your efforts to get a handle on things that are beyond your purview. Give it up and be here instead. Be here with the people who say they love you. Let them say you’re a genius. Let them say you’re beautiful. Be here and believe them for a change.
Love,
Polly
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