Dysmorphic

Self portrait. Taken c. November 2008.

Lately I’ve been noticing my age more—the grey hairs on my head that seem to be sprouting more and more each year, the wrinkles on my forehead, how stiff my back gets after sitting for a long time. Mere reminders I’m a little closer to death than I was when I was in my twenties. I don’t mind getting older, it’s just the feeling older part that makes me, well, feel old. I’m sure most people who have gone into their 30’s have felt a sense of loss with aging. What they were once able to get away with in their college days is now virtually impossible in their mid 30’s. I sleep with a body pillow now in order to keep my back aligned and let me tell you, what a great invention! I don’t think I ever realized how sleeping wrong can really affect how you function throughout the day, and I wish I listened when people told me to pay attention to posture or how important ergonomics is when you’re working a desk job.

With that, I have also noticed my physical appearance more. I think I’ve had body dysmorphia for most of my life, but I just never really discuss it. In fact, I just don’t acknowledge it. My mother definitely had body dysmorphia and I’ve heard from therapists that if your parent has a poor view of how they see themselves, that can be passed down to their children. My mother was beautiful, and I always wished she would acknowledge that. I have no idea what she saw when she viewed herself, but she constantly asked me if she looked fat on an almost daily basis.

If I’m being 100% honest with myself, I’ve always hated the way I look. I’ve never been happy with my appearance. I almost feel like I have no idea what I actually look like. Do I believe the mirror, a reflective object that seems to change my appearance every time I look into it? The photos that are taken at different angles, 99% never flattering and subjected to lens distortion? Or the image I have in my head of what I think I look like?

People will compliment me occasionally on my appearance, but I never believe them because I can’t see what they see. I wonder if it’s any better than the image I have in my head, the pictures captured by other people or what the mirror reflects back to me. I can’t seem to fathom how people love taking pictures of themselves or having their picture taken. I immediately want to scream when someone wants to take a picture of me. I will indulge in the occasional selfie and immediately hate myself, wondering if I’m providing a fabricated version of myself to the world—a distortion that is purely a lie just because I was having a good hair day or I like the shirt I was wearing, but not the accurate representation of how I actually look. I always assume the worst version of myself is the most accurate because nothing can ever be that good, but maybe the worst versions of myself isn’t accurate, either. Maybe some things are just good.

My preference being behind the camera is one not only based in just enjoying taking pictures, but never having to put myself in the spotlight. I can talk about myself without it being obvious I’m talking about myself, my problems, my fears, my dreams. It’s submerged in composition, light, lines, and colors. I can be a faceless woman who has a lot to say but doesn’t want the facade attached with those thoughts. It’s almost a dissociative experience when I take a picture. I don’t think, I don’t plan, I just feel. It’s instinctual, primal, intuitive. It’s the closest I ever get to shutting my brain off, and despite all that, my photographs say so much about my feelings than I know consciously. Over the last few years, I’ve realized how therapeutic it’s been. If I go a few days without photographing something, I get a little…cranky? If one good thing came out of the pandemic, it’s rediscovering photography and what I’m capable of doing with it.

This wasn’t much of a thing when I was younger. When I was a teen, I was so fucking cocky in an embarrassing way. My photography was consistently lauded and upheld up until my early days of college. I was humbled when I took a photography course and the professor who taught it essentially hated every thing I printed—I was lucky to get a B on an assignment. He wasn’t helpful in any sense and offered no pointers or suggestions for improvement. He was critical and almost bitter he was teaching an intro photography class in an Orange County community college. I got the feeling he didn’t like me very much and it just made photography into an exhausting chore rather than a fun hobby. After I took that course, I didn’t touch a camera for seven years. Any time I had to photograph something, I purposely made it look terrible. I figured I peaked in high school, and I had nothing more to say. My feelings were hurt and my ego was bruised. I took one man’s opinion way too seriously when I could have spent those seven years honing my craft as a ‘fuck you’ to a man who couldn’t take a decent picture if his life depended on it. I wish I wasn’t so stubborn. I wasted so much time putting stock in an opinion that shouldn’t have meant that much to me but did. I do that more often than not, and somehow I still have that one fucker’s voice in my head that is telling me I’m no good at taking a picture. I’m tired of listening to anything he has to say. It’s been almost fifteen years and his voice still lives rent free in my head.

I’m old enough now to know his thoughts were worthless, but when you’re young you don’t realize that one negative opinion doesn’t mean anything in comparison to a consensus of good opinions. You take things more personally, you’re more sentimental. Everything feels finalized, and it’s so easy to get lost in the details of meaningless shit you’ll barely remember in ten years. Maybe things don’t work the same way they did when I was 22, but I feel like what I’ve lost in skin elasticity and metabolism, I made up for in wisdom.