The most hated photo

In May I wrote the "No more good pictures" post.

I already knew that I wouldn't like any of the pictures going forward. There have been other things that I have noticed since then, including that I stopped looking at the camera. In the pictures I posted through August, my eyes are always off to the side, apparently looking for a way to escape the lens.

The pictures from these last few weeks constitute kind of a turning point. When we went to Australia and New Zealand in 2008, I took hundreds of pictures. Only three include me. One is the picture that they take automatically when you hold the koala (and I wanted to hold a koala). The other two are when I took pictures from a vehicle and caught myself in the mirror.

I realized at the time that wasn't good, and that I should try and not avoid cameras so much. In fact, I started something where I took one picture of myself each month in 2009, to try and get better. I didn't start liking the way I looked, but it got me used to pictures enough to stop flinching.

That may make it ironic that the picture I hate the most happened in 2009. It was only early 2009.

There are a lot of things I hate about this picture. The main thing is that I look huge. I look huge in other pictures too, of course - that is why I started having my picture taken in the first place.

This one is worse because I am at a weird angle due to sitting on a stool, but the way my coat falls back hides that angle, making it look like all of that is me. Most of it is me, but not all of it.

 

Part of my hatred for this picture is context. It was posted on Facebook (not by me), and another person who was there commented on it saying how friendly or welcoming I looked. Based on how I looked, that should have been sarcasm, but it was actually a dig at my sisters. This is from the time between when I still thought said person was nice but dim, and she still thought she could come between my sisters and I. The manipulation was not nice of course, but it also showed she was even dumber than I had realized.

That made me hate the picture more, because of the association with someone who was much worse than she initially appeared, and knowing that even a friendly gathering still has people playing mind games. I may have viewed it more negatively than it actually was, because that was a very hard time in my life.

I came back from Australia to no job, after having been jerked around pretty badly by my former employer. The economic collapse from September made job hunting much worse than it had ever been before. I applied for so many jobs with no response; I ended up having to track applications in a spreadsheet so I wasn't duplicating my efforts. I had always been able to get the job that I wanted before. I was never rich, but I was able to be generous and help people. That seemed to be at an end. This is about when I realized that the tax training I had devoted weeks to wasn't going to pan out either.

There was plenty of reason to be miserable, which may have made it the wrong year to try and learn to be okay with how I look. You can only manage so much at once.

Six and a half years later, I'm at it again. I still hate having my picture taken. I still force myself to do it. I usually manage to look at the camera.

Mainly, being completely honest with myself, my real hope was always that I would get smaller, so I would actually look better, and then I could be okay with that. I never actually wanted to reconcile myself to being fat. That seems to be what is necessary now.

Anyway, that's what we're looking at this week.