A brief word about selfies

I am currently on my third round of doing #365feministselfie, where I take pictures of myself for a year and post them.

When I started it the first time, it was largely a response to how deeply I hated pictures of myself, and having my picture taken. It took about three months, but I started feeling better about me. That wasn't a matter of finding myself more attractive or cuter, but just being okay with how I looked, beyond of the expectations of how I thought I should look.

The second time was harder, because my life started getting harder and there was no getting away from myself when those daily pictures were staring me in the face. I saw the deadening, and I didn't want to be posting that to the world. Perhaps I had gotten away from thinking that I needed to be pretty, but I had not gotten away from thinking that I needed to look happy.

Those thoughts have strong gender conditioning in them. It is there going in, and it found me there when I would get comments about smiling more. 

I also see opinions from people I don't know about selfies in general. It is common for men to opine on them, and not just by asking women to smile more. Often they like to criticize the practice of taking selfies and trying to look cute and being so vain and self-absorbed.

I saw one last week that I can't find now. It stuck out because last week I had a theme of drawing faces on other body parts, so I had just posted one with a face on my fat stomach, the mouth around the belly button. It was not cute, it was not trying to be cute, but it was still open to criticism. I remember a tweet a while back complaining about women going from the flower crown filter to the dog filter, like how dare they first look pretty and then look funny and weird? I think he called it trashy.

This is probably a case where why you do something is more important than that you do it, but if there are people posting selfies who hope they look cute and they get told they are cute, and that feels good, that can be okay.

What I do know is that there is a lot in this world that is designed to tell you that you are not okay. If it were giving you actual helpful suggestions for improvement that could be useful, but that's not how it works.

It is possible to be vain and needy, and it is possible to break those chains. It is possible to want validation from others when you really need to feel good about yourself. It is possible to feel good about yourself for not great reasons.

Social media can help or hurt, but be careful about being led by it. I know that I don't spend much time on Facebook, because I keep seeing it showing me notifications I would not normally need (this person has posted a picture or updated their status), or showing me every question prompt that any friend of mine has answered. Because I recognize that, I can also ignore it.

If you feel worse, try using it less, or differently, or not at all. Understanding where the feelings come from can help.

It is a wonderful thing to understand that you have value, and that so does everyone else, and that their value does not take away from yours. 

Whichever one you are having trouble with, learn about that.

But I promise your value is separate from your physical appearance, even if you are super cute.