A break from photos

You’ll have noticed less photos of me over on Instagram recently, and I thought I’d let you know why.

Go ahead - have a little break from my face

I’ve been really honest from the beginning of this challenge how much I hate having my photo taken. And I very much still do.

So having my photo taken every day has been an actual painful chore. 

One of the reasons for this is because it's so unusual for me, as I’ve never really been that engaged in the way I look. I know that sounds really weird for someone who really really loves clothes, but it’s true. For me there is a fundamental difference between caring about what my style communicates and seeking to glorify/ mitigate the genetic accident that is my features. My face looks the way it looks, it'd be a horrible waste of time to try and make it look any different.

I want to be clear I don't hate, or even dislike my face - I'm just not very interested in it. It has the normal number and placings of features -  I look look neither astoundingly beautiful nor appallingly hideous. My face does what it is supposed to, and I'm fine with that. I make the best of it with some tinted moisturiser and some bronzer on work days - but have never engaged in faffing with 'sculpting' makeup to give me the appearance of cheekbones or whatever - simply because I can't see what difference it could possibly make to my life.

I think that my attitude to my face is pretty healthy - and I think my sense of perspective has been aided by always having some very pretty girls as friends. There has literally never been a time in my life when I’ve been the prettiest girl in the room and actually that has really worked for me. This is not an area in my life where I can try really hard and somehow make a huge impact. I’ve never been the girl who spends hours on make up or hair because I’ve always looked around me and thought – what’s the point – that’s never going to be my thing.

I’m not saying that in a woe is me way – it doesn’t worry me at all. In fact I've watched some of my gorgeous friends have their intellect under valued, being disliked by other women, and just being aggressively pursued in the supermarket and in doctors surgeries (places where I think we can agree no-one goes looking for a date) purely as a result of their looks - so I know knock down beauty isn't an out and out gift. It can be a bloody pain too.

And I also know that once we are past our painful teenage years that our facial features are far from the headlines of our attractiveness. I don't worry that my husband will desert me for a prettier face, or that if he did do something so foolish that I'd be alone forever.I know I’m funny, I know my energy, fierceness and enthusiasm is pretty attractive and that for a particular type of man I am exactly how they like their tea (and breakfast and dinner...). So as an adult I’ve never equated my value to anyone with the way I look.

So I never really thought about my face, never considered it, never spent hours in front of the mirror examining it, never took endless selfies to show the best side of myself. My considered opinion on all that nonsense? Bollocks to it! Until this year, when I’ve had my photo taken every day. And every day I’ve had to look at photos of my face. And they don’t really match my idea of myself. I always look sad in photos, or like I’m grimacing. And it's not even about that - it's that I feel like the more I see images of myself - the more my sense of self is about those images rather than what I'm feeling and experiencing. Those photos and the need to look at them are affecting my sense of self. And I don't like it.

Varanasi was beautiful. And my memories about it have nothing to do with how I looked..

I'm so glad I grew up when I did. When you took a photo then had to wait weeks for it to be developed. When peoples voices, the way they sounded on the phone, the letters and postcards they wrote and mixtapes they put together where what formed your depth of impressions of them when you were apart. We didn't have the option of looking someone up and seeing an image of their face when we missed them. I genuinely worry what my teenage years would be like if I lived them now. If all those friends I made who loved me because I danced with sheer abandon were greeted with what that looked like in stills the next day. Worse if I was. Because in my head all of that fun and energy shone out of me and made me a magnet for fun (& I really think it did), but the photo lens isn't going to get that - or at least hardly ever. And I think my fragile emerging teenage self might have lost some of her bravery and her arrogance if she was presented with all these two dimensional images of herself, that had no room for her silliness, or the sound of her laugh. My teenage years are documented in photos yes, but also in poems, and stories written between friends, in stolen jumpers, and swapped treasures and none of it is online - which means I've been able to curate this collection to tell the stories that are healthy for me to remember, and leave behind the ones that I shouldn't. And I think that has been healthy for me.

So knowing this why would my 35 year old self choose to document every day of this year with a photo of myself? Why would I post a photo of me knackered and pale and resentfully posing in my front room every day? Photos that are taken when I get in from work, at that point in the day when really I just want to talk to Matt, change into my dressing gown and then snuggle up with the dog.What purpose does this serve? 

My Instagram feed these days – yuck.It used to be photos of my dog, my friends & weird and wonderful London sights - now it is an unrelenting wall of me. Is that how I want to remember my 35th year - by how I looked everyday? I think not. It’s so self regarding and so SO not who I am. But I’ve kept it up because it felt like part of the deal of this whole capsule experiment.

You can see how little I wanted this snap taken yes?

While Ange and I were away we stayed for a couple of days in Amma’s ashram. And photography isn’t allowed there, and there are no mirrors in the rooms. So for three days I got a break from my face. I got a break from awkwardly posing for photos whilst hating myself for doing it, and break from worrying what you guys thought of the photos when I put them up.

And I liked it so much I’m sticking with it. There will still be some photos – to demonstrate how I manage changes in the weather, or big occasions – to introduce you to my final 3 items & if I come up with a new way of wearing something. But that is it. You’ll kind of have to trust me. I am going to stick with this (I’m too bloody minded not to), but I’m not going to undo all the good this experiment has done me in terms of changing the way I think – by letting those teeny tiny claws of self hatred grab a hold of me every evening as I pose for a photo.

But if you do want to see photos from a woman with a real sense of who she is beyond what she looks like I would urge you to read this from Julie Kirk she's pretty awesome.

In other news - there are still a couple of tickets left for tomorrows clothes swap - you can read about it and book tickets here. And if you want to donate - that's cool too (tomorrow I'll be 9 months in!!!!)

If you want to hear me banging on more about capsule fashion, Katrina from Soul, Style, Story interviewed me earlier in the week. If I were you I'd head here on her site where they talk about an app that will (I hope) change the way we shop for the better.....