The protagonist of my own narrative

Self-love, selfies, and glamour

It’s weird to look at my face as I age because in so many ways I feel like it hasn’t changed at all. Maybe it’s because I don’t have wrinkles yet, but to me, I still look more or less the same at almost forty as I did in my twenties.

I used to take a lot of selfies when I was in my twenties, back before they were called selfies.

It’s weird to think of the sort of narcissism I was able to muster when it came to photos of myself. I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had the sense that I was attractive or pretty, and that photographs of myself pleased that aesthetic part of me. But more than that, there is a simultaneous distancing and sense of voyeuristic intimacy that happens when viewing yourself through the impersonal lens of a real camera that isn’t quite the same thing as looking at yourself with your front-facing lens on your phone. I am seeing myself in a more objective way, even as the shots were composed to be the most flattering possible.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped taking photographs of myself.

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