How It Started / How It's Going: On learning to love my bad photos one derp moment at a time

Yes, complete with said derp photos

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How it started…

How it’s going…

I almost didn’t share this photo.

I didn’t even save it when I saw it in the Facebook photo dump someone shared from the open mic I attend. I low key cringed at first because immediately this iconic diva flashed into my mind (and if you’re a Disney fan, you know the relevance of this reference)!

When I first saw this photo, I immediately started judging it: my face looks bloated and my nose looks big. I’m clearly mid-speech so my tongue and lips are in an awkward placement. It’s a bad angle. You can’t see the detail of my makeup so it looks like I have no eyelashes (when actually my makeup was pretty flawless that evening). And the list goes on and on…

The more I stared at it, the derpier it got.

I brushed it off and scrolled past, which is a drastic improvement from only a few months ago when a photo like this would have temporarily tanked my self confidence and thrown me overboard into questioning everything.

Fast forward a few hours into the day, and I went back to that post to really LOOK at the photo, to study it. To get curious about it. And I thought, “Isn’t this the exact kind of photo I should be sharing? The real and authentic totally-in-the-moment hey-I’m-human-too kind of photo? The kind of photo I should learn to embrace?”

Yes, I love a beautifully curated, perfectly poised and well-lit photo with great angles that show off my outfits, slim my face, and highlight my good side (yes, I have a good side and a bad side, and it’s wild how different they photograph).

But…

I don’t want that to be all I share and post because then I’m totally ignoring the reality: my face is multifaceted—just like me!

Sometimes it looks puffier or larger in photos than it actually is. Sometimes (a lot of the time) the details of my face that I love don’t fully come through in photos, like my soulful brown eyes. Sometimes, I just have to sigh and chalk it up to Flynn Rider syndrome: “They just can’t get my nose right!”

We can have a tendency to scrutinize every single little part of ourselves until we actually sit with the discomfort that they trigger. And exactly why are we all so triggered and sensitive about how we look?

That’s a loaded question I can’t fully dissect here (*cough*patriarchy and conditioning) but so often we forget we’re human, with skin that puckers, folds, wrinkles and dimples. We forget how lighting can make us look distorted; how we’ve been told appearance = worth and value; how social media is such a curated, fake place and we don’t see/post/share nearly enough of the “bad pictures” for fear of scrutiny or shame. Thus, we’ve come to believe that we should fit some media-driven narrative about how we should look and always look flawless 100% of the time above all else, and that anything less than that isn’t worth sharing.

This inspired me to go through my camera roll and find more of these types of photos: the unflattering angles, the eyes half-closed, the total derp face (honestly, I kind of love these now; I find them endearing). I combed through for photos I downgraded to recycle bin level and never gave a second thought. Unfortunately, I think I deleted majority of the really bad ones, but hey—there’s always tomorrow!

For some reason, I find this one below to be particularly derpy with the way I’m smiling. The me of last summer (when I took it) would be gasping that I’m sharing it. But the me of today? 500 points to Gryffindor! I’ve been through hell and back to get to the point of being able to not only share something like this, but to find beauty in my imperfections.

Imagine hating me, and I’m just staring at you like this (probably after I told the dumbest dad joke and started going, “Hehehehehe”):

Do I want to post photos of me mid-blink, hunched over with awful posture, cellulite shining in the sun or open-mouth chewing all the time? No. But I can pepper those in every now and then as reminders that I’m a human being; that I can look (and feel) like this:

And literally two seconds, a different angle/distance and an inopportune split-second later, I look like this with a triple chin:

Is one version worthier than another? Of course not!

But there was a time not so long ago where I would have said only one of these versions was worthy of being seen because of what societal messaging manipulates us to believe—that beauty is power, worth, success, value, etc. etc. etc.

Looking unflattering or different from the norm had me feeling like I didn’t deserve that success or spotlight (*coupled with many negative experiences I had growing up surrounding my appearance and my body—it’s never cut & dry). I believed that if I could be traditionally beautiful like the women I saw in magazines and on TV and control how that image was portrayed, then I would be worthy of love and safe from ridicule (because the world and particularly the internet can be a nasty, trolly place).

I’ve always been sensitive about my appearance because I struggled heavily with body dysmorphia growing up (as a millennial woman, I feel like we had it particularly bad). I was deeply cruel to myself for decades and couldn’t stand the way I looked in photos.

Because I couldn’t change my face and my whole life felt out of control, that ballooned into an eating disorder. My food intake felt like one of the few things I did have control over and could influence the way I appeared. As you’d expect, it only made the demons in my head louder and reinforced the whole awful narrative.

This is only about 0.001% of that story, but suffice to say I processed much of that pain through art and writing. Creativity became the world in which I could appear as I saw myself inside, not how I physically appeared. I’ve always admired that about myself—my resilience and perspective. I took all that excruciating pain and dark depression and turned it into beauty in various forms; beauty as I saw it, not how others told me it should look.

Even now at 37, I’m still dissecting my beliefs around beauty because some of those beliefs were deeply, profoundly tangled (and apparently, really good at hiding).

I literally had a nose job at the beginning of this year, trying to achieve the filtered version of myself I’d been sharing on stories, not realizing how truly unachievable it was or that limiting beliefs around my appearance were even still lurking deep within. I’d gotten so used to seeing people on Instagram with “snatched” jawlines and poreless, smooth skin that over time, my brain began to blur the lines between reality and filters. The AI and filters these days are also so incredibly subtle that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even tell real from fake (which is why I appreciate accounts like @saggysara who expose the illusions of social media).

In the end, I’m grateful the way things shook out because it led me to what I truly needed—radical self acceptance. It just didn’t happen the way I’d planned, and it certainly wasn’t because of realized expectations (the opposite, actually—which is, of course, what I needed: perspective).

I’m also not completely immune to societal messaging (I’m not sure any of us are; we’re human, with a very natural desire to belong), and I tend to learn my lessons the hard way. The road to sovereignty is a long one, but I am nothing if not committed to doing the work.

I’m still processing that experience and my residual BDD, but I have zero shame about sharing the full story when the time comes because I want to be totally transparent with you. I hope it will be illuminating for someone else like it was for me because social media isn’t real. One could argue even PHOTOS and VIDEO are not real. They don’t accurately portray someone because you’re missing 99% of who that person actually is. You’re missing out on their energy, their values and beliefs, how it feels to be in their presence, their kindness, their BEINGNESS. Those will never translate in a photo or video.

We’re so much more than the way we look, and it’s honestly the *least* interesting thing about us.

We are a world of moons, and a moon has phases. So too do we.

We wax and wane. We have texture. We contain light and dark (and derp)! And through it all, by learning to love even the most unflattering parts, we illuminate that which we could not see before: the truth.

And there is no lens available that can capture that much light.

Poem from my first poetry collection, Pressed Petals

I’d love to hear in the comments—have you struggled with something similar? And the bigger question at play: have you learned to love your inner-derp? :)

With love & hope always,