Taking The Self Out Of Selfies
the woes of the mirage
Dearest Mirror,
Lately I stare at my naked body with solemn silence. It seemingly changed overnight. When I look at pictures of myself from a year or two ago, the differences seem subtle, gradual. And yet there's still the new roundness of my face, the inaugural rolls of my belly, extra flesh to tuck. It's bittersweet because some of it goes to my thighs, and it's welcome there. And even my breasts are a little fuller, which I greet with gratitude after years of wearing padded bras to compensate for their lack.
Bodies are strange things. Mine, she loves to play tricks. I think of this vessel as its own entity, and sometimes we hold negotiations. Sometimes she holds me hostage. There are days when I have to nurse her back to life, there are days when I neglect her, and there are days when she threatens to mutiny.
my thoughts regarding my body are as follows:
all perceptions of bodies are false
the body is a performance
all portraiture and all self documentation is a reconciliation
Under this lens, any capture of my visage is transformed from an act of vanity into a sacred ritual of brushing my inner self against the softness of what a body represents, and what a body can truly be.
Into the picture (pun intended) naturally comes the subject of “selfies,” the most common manifestation of that capturing. Selfies are fun. They are the falsest understanding of the self yet the most accessible. Anyone with a front facing camera can take a selfie, and if the mirage is too imperfect there are filters and there are photo editing apps, and there is social media to reinforce the narrative, the mythos of how a body is—and the methodology by which they shall be consumed. Women have collectively boiled this down to a science: an algorithm of colors, shadows, angles and clever timing. The end result is us, spellbound, each one of us, by the limitless supply of illusions, suggestions, and rhetorical questions our likeness elicits.
So how can I honor her, the body? How else than by recreating her, dissembling her, having the audacity to approximate her…and too, by celebrating her, learning her, announcing her, sharing her?
What exhausts me is the perversion of this honoring by those who knock at the door of my body without wiping their feet or washing their hands or having even the caricature of shame to lower their gaze. Those who come with demands. The sharing we do was once meant as a “look don’t touch” sort of spectacle, a “you break you buy it” glass wall. Though we might make a show of the sharing, it is (or was?) still ours. That is the sanctity of this exercise: that it is public yet invitation only. But over time, the lines have blurred, and the eavesdroppers have been deluded into expecting the privilege of being participant to conversations they were never invited to. Imagine you and a close friend are whispering to each other across the table at a diner and another patron comes to you and demands that you talk about something he can relate to.
But so is the way men seek to remove me from myself. Here is my body but could she twist to the left, could she bend over, could she swallow him, could she discord, discard, could she be his? (Which is such a silly question, because how could she? In what universe could she ever be his?)
Of course, in an era where a fantasy is as good a currency as any, a well crafted lie is simply economic.
cinncerely,
Lana 1
A previous version of this was originally published in one of my early zine issues. Enjoy this new edition.