When the Oxford English Dictionary chose to add the word “selfie” to its annals, I protested because it’s an ugly word. It feels like something that ended up in your mouth but really shouldn’t be there, the pice of hard plastic that you spit out in horror when you’re chewing your food at a restaurant. I have no idea how singular or how common my reaction was because I didn’t know anyone else that took issue with the word. When people asked me what we should call them instead, I never had an alternate term at hand. It’s 2023 and I’ve finally figured out why: I’m against the practice.
I truly didn’t know this until the year was almost over. I thought I hated selfies because I hate taking selfies. And I do, but my frustrations on the personal level are concrete. I stand in front of a full-length mirror and can’t figure out how to get my face right, or the lighting is undesirable, or the angle is too-much-of-this-not-enough-of-that, and I keep thinking, “I am going to die someday, and my finite time of earth should be spent doing something other than this.” Not everyone agrees with me, as everyone knows, so I haven’t made a habit of talking about it. When I see them on my social media feed I either feel pleasurable twinges against my better judgement or I grumble, or sometimes, confusingly, both. But I was about to end my 2022 social media postings with a gym selfie (god, I really hate that word) because, frankly, I felt pretty badass for strapping on my rain boots and assorted other gear to tromp invincibly to the gym in a crazy, actual-rivers-on-the-ground-inducing storm.
I also like attention, I wouldn’t do this so often if I didn’t, and well, I could keep this dignified by reminding you that when I first signed up for my gym membership I did not feel comfortable being seen in a sports bra. (I used to keep my shirt on during my workouts, feels like lifetimes ago!) Or I could go the “Hey, it’s 2023!” route and be up front about the fact that the only attention I’ve ever gotten in a sports bra has been positive attention and while I’d like to wrap that up with a disability-activist ribbon and say “my body isn’t supposed to be sexy so it’s therefore subversive when I do it,” that’s obviously not the reason. You can be sexy and still wear a damn shirt. I like when I don’t have to. So I stood in front of the wall-sized mirror on the second floor of my gym with my hair still wet from the rain, and it was immediately clear that this was not going to work. If I stood a comfortable distance from the mirror I looked 500 feet away, and if I got up close to the mirror I could barely tell what I was taking a picture of, and by the way, my Patagonia raincoat did its job all the way down but it never touched my legs, so my unsuspecting yoga pants were entirely soaked through. I did not want to spend all afternoon taking this fucking photo.
Suddenly, one of the most incandecently beautiful men I have ever seen just…appeared. I had been at the gym for a while by that time, tolerating my soaked leggings in the name of athletic performance, and I had not seen him. He’s not someone I’d typically miss: I’m liable to believe he just materialized from a dream realm. “Do you want me to take a picture of you?” he asked.
“Oh my god thank you,” I burbled undignifiedly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just not a part of this culture.”
He laughed, knowingly. (Never has a statement been so obvious.) “I got you, you want the mirror in the back or—”
“It really doesn’t matter.”
“Cool, we’ll take a few, here, one, two three, and…”
All of this in less than two minutes, eight photos, a delightful, intoxicating moment, at least for my part; I wouldn’t dare speak for him. At one point he said, “Oh wait, I’m in this picture,” and I might have actually said, “That’s okay!” out loud before he stepped aside. This was the restrained version of, “Actually, get in the frame, my twitter friends will lose their minds over you [the way I’m doing now cough cough].”
I used to get my picture taken by strangers on a semi-regular basis, which I had truly forgotten until I reflected on this moment. When I lived in Austin in my early 20’s, I wore a bright red bowler hat that caught the attention of a guy who spotted me at an antique shop and asked if he could take my picture for his Flickr page. “I like cool hats,” he said. In Chicago, years earlier, a professional photographer stopped me at a bookstore and said he wanted to give me his card. I was momentarily skeptical when he said, “I’d like to take your picture sometime,” but Dude was legit, it turned out; I looked up his website the night we met and found out that he’d photographed Billy Coorgan and other major pop culture figures of the era. (Unfortunately, our shoot never materialized.)
In New Orleans, a Bulgarian photographer asked permission to shoot my best friend and me as we sat together on a fountain, “With you looking at the tree,” he said (I do look at trees pretty intently). And in Boston, 2015 or therabouts, a younger photographer with an accent I couldn’t place told me he liked to photograph interesting people he met on the street. I was wearing a floor-length down coat and a warm hat because it was Boston in December, and I guess reflecting on the most traumatic aspects of my past while gazing out at the ice-skaters in the Boston Commons did something. I definitely didn’t want to talk about what, though. He told me that he typically had a few words from his subjects under the photo, detailing what they’re thinking about. I’d said, “Home.”
“Anything else you want to add?”
“No.”
“Some people really get personal,” he told me. “They tell me their whole life stories.”
“Not me.”
It felt weirdly good to be that person: my trademark effervecence taking a break, my trademark oversharing taking a break, my trademark loquaciousness taking a break. I might have felt mysterious and elusive, if I hadn’t known that it was unresolved trauma that had my lips squeezed tight that day. Still, annoying as might have been the verbal exchange at that time in my life, the moment between us as subject-and-photographer was perfect. Welcome, even. If there’s one thing I never felt in Boston, it was beautiful or interesting or enticing to any degree. I got hope from that camera. Hope I’ve finally come into now.
I’ve never seen a selfie that filled me with a sense of hope. My sense is that the art form (I do own that it’s an art form) arose from a sense of desire, want, emptiness, doubt, in the guise of confidence. If that sounds harsh, it’s because I’m not communicating this well: it’s not meant to be harsh. What I’m getting at is that, to me, a selfie looks lonely. And when I talk to people that post them as regularly as I post these essays, I don’t get the sense that they love how they look. And I can’t imagine spending so much time taking your own picture if you don’t love how you look.
One podcast interview I heard in 2022 that I haven’t stopped thinking about is Kate Moss’s appearence on Desert Island Discs. The BBC presenter, Lauren Laverne, asked Kate Moss if she had always wanted to be a model. The answer was a measured no, absolutely not, because “to want to be a model you have to think that you’re pretty. I never thought I was pretty.”
I’ve never heard any woman declare that they believe they’re pretty except my cousin Angi (and she is). If everyone thought so (whatever that means to us as individuals) would we need to get Likes from strangers, alone? I say “we” when I made a big deal of not doing it myself, but I do tend to slice off the sharpest points of wit I can polish and put that out there for strangers; is it the same thing? Are my word-thoughts just selfies in sentences? They do tend to be about me.
Not sure how to break out of the whole damn thing, but maybe we’ll figure it out this year.