Do you hate being photographed? (1)

Vanity winning over posterity

If like me you’re overweight and self-conscious about it, I’d like to ask you a series of questions -

Do you refuse to be photographed?  

Have you destroyed pictures of yourself because you think they made you look ugly/fat?

Was the reason in both cases because you felt ashamed of how you looked?

(There’s nothing wrong with that up to a point – in many ways this is how we improve ourselves, because we hate the way we are.  But…)

Did you feel ashamed because you think it means people will see you have no self-control? ………

………Or because it showed?  You probably mutter to yourself that if you had a secret drink or a sex addiction problem at least nobody in the street would notice as you went about your business, they wouldn’t whisper about you behind your back, etc. 

Is it true to say that part of your self-loathing is that overweight is such a visible failure, a form of constant and relentless process of public humiliation?

So now tell me:  how exactly does air-brushing yourself out of your own history - which is what you're doing by destroying your photographs - help resolve this process of self-torture? 

Do you really think that in years to come when you’re long gone, your grandchildren will say to each other “we had a grandmother, apparently she was attractive but we’re not sure, because there are no photos of her and we have no idea what she looked like – but she must have been fat, or worse, so it’s just as well”. 

Or how about….

“We have some photos of our grandmother – she was slim and pretty when she was young.  For the rest of her life, all we’ve got to go on is what our mother tells us – she says Granny was plumper than in those pictures, but attractive.  We have to take her word for it, but we wish we could see for ourselves what she looked like when we were little.”

And you’ll be up there sitting on a fluffy cloud, berating yourself – “why the hell didn’t someone stop me from being so selfish and vain?  I want to live on through my family and there’s so little of me left…”

If you read bandit blogs and you find it useful therapy to interact with bloggers who are going through the same difficult process, I put it to you that it’s not only about managing to lose the weight and sharing the euphoria with the rest of us – though it’s part of it and we all rejoice or commiserate together – it’s also about addressing the hang-ups the overweight has caused us, and by examining them and turning them this way and that, see if we can beat them and fight our way back to a normal self-image.

We shouldn’t punish ourselves for being less attractive than we would like by not permitting images of us to be in circulation.  I strongly believe that by doing so we are not taking responsibility for our bodies.  And this means we do not love ourselves.

Lets throw off our burdens of guilt, punishment and self-consciousness, and say to the world “this is the way I am, and it is your loss if you cannot see beyond the shell of my body.”

The first step is to look people in the eye and stand by the bad photographs as well as the good.

In the next post I’ll put my money where my mouth is.

-oOo-

Photo Finish -

From Lonicera's non-digital archive

To make you smile...  these pictures won't produce the famous "Laugh Out Loud" that bloggers are so fond of talking about - but they made me smile when I took them, and I hope they do you too.

The first two were taken at an open day somewhere during the era when robots were all the rage.  This entertainer was superb, though clearly the child in the second photo wouldn't have agreed, to the embarrassment of his father...

(I think he was pretending he was going to take away

the child's tennis ball, don't you think??)

This one below of John was taken for a camera club competition

and I wanted to call it - go on, have a guess..............

yup, "In the Dog House", complete with correct expression.

Weston-super-Mare, a breezy day on the pier. 

Look closely at the sign.  No, closer. 

Three words are distinguishable on it, not two...

The next five were taken at St Ives, in Cornwall.  I'd love to have any of these three as my address.  It would have been wonderful to get several girls to pose in a queue under this first one...

Seagulls are a pain in St Ives, there are so many... probably because there is too much fast food around, and they all get fat on greasy chips.  However, the average British person will not hesitate when making the decision between obeying a sign and feeding animals and birds, and the evidence of this civil disobedience was all around this sign, so I probably should have stepped back to include it.

'Ere - where's me chips then?

This last one was taken at Lyme Regis, in Dorset.  This is no grabbed shot - the cat was clearly quite at home,  waiting for scraps, and some kind person had even put a tea towel on the windowsill so his bottom wouldn't get cold...

-oOo-

Go to Part 2

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