Selfie therapy Sunday January 7th 2018 – First, thank you my dear sister Mari for your email today. I appreciate it and I appreciate you. I appreciate all of my sisters, those with whom I share a biological link and those who are sisters in life experience — the wild and crazy and untamed (or whatever label you wear) women.
I appreciate the men in my life too, particularly the two who make it possible for me to get away with wasting time blogging when blogging doesn’t make enough money to pay any bills. I went to Loonyville on them on Christmas Eve 2017, losing my sh** because of all the stress of the holidays. I was a complete mess. But they haven’t abandoned me yet, so I thank them for that. I don’t think I could have pulled the same on the women in my life and they would continue to stay around me. Only a real and true absolute 10000% BFF would go through that ugly stuff with you and still love the whole and total crazy package of you. Because they would know what’s really going on. But I don’t have such a person in my life. So I am grateful that these two men are willing to try to love a wild spirit like me.
Selfie therapy Sunday January 7th 2018
I have lately made the life changing decision that I don’t need to try anymore to please people. For so many years of my life I’ve been afraid to be seen by certain people, because they have in the past made so much of my appearance that I have not wanted them to see me (or see pictures of me) unless I could control what they were seeing. There’s a particular guy that comes to mind. He would think nothing of scrutinizing my pictures and comparing one photo to the next. “This one’s out of this world. That one not so much…” It was such an obnoxious thing and one of primary reasons that I just wasn’t impressed by his expressed interest in me. I was clearly nothing more than an object to him. And how much or how little interest he had in me depended on how beautiful he thought I was from one picture to the next.
I have always insisted to this man that I am not beautiful, and he has always responded with irritation and annoyance and confusion as to why I would think that I’m not beautiful. It’s really very simple. I know that if he and most other people saw me without makeup they would not consider me beautiful. Many might even go as far as to call me ugly. And these days, now that I am aging, even when I am wearing makeup, few people would call me beautiful. And the glorious thing is, it doesn’t matter. It was always something that bothered me, not necessarily because I wanted to be beautiful, but because I didn’t want to be “not beautiful”. But now, I don’t care. In fact, now, I am determined to remove the poison from my mind and from the rest of my system. I am determined to celebrate what makes me who I am, and to use my face to give expression to my truth, even while my face is losing all the things that made it possible in the past for me pass for beautiful in some eyes.
I am working on a selfie book that will be filled with pictures of me giving expression to my artistic truth using my face. This picture above is one of the pictures that was taken during a session of capturing pictures for the book. I have never been one to believe that being beautiful is having a perfect face. I don’t really like the concept of beauty. And I try to remind myself whenever I can remember, to drop the word from my vocabulary. It takes working on, because I do have a complex of being afraid to be seen and judged on account of my awareness that beauty is all that matters to people, and that is what we do–we judge each other, scrutinize one another’s appearance, in all too many cases, we try to tear each other down. My goal is to rise above all of this; but I know that it will take trying to stay conscious every day for the rest of my life. And I will not be successful every day. Especially as I am pursuing my music and with my plans to release my album this year.
Pardon the interruption. I know you’re trying to read this article! Don’t forget to check out my single “Baby Thanks A Million” and follow me on Spotify. I need to get that Spotify count up! Who’ll be kind enough to make it go up by 1?
It will be a struggle to maintain my resolve in the face of other people’s judgement of my appearance. But for the sake of my senior self, so that she will be able to live and laugh and love herself when no amount of anti aging creams will reverse the signs of aging in her face, I am determined to be the victor in that struggle. I am determined to always know that my truth lies in my soul, and not in my face.
When I was a young girl, I used to stare at my face in the mirror, trying hard to understand how the look of my face had anything to do with my worthiness. I could never see anything wrong with my face, and so I was deeply conflicted, because I understood that in the eyes of other people, I wasn’t “special”, because I didn’t look the way a girl needed to look in order to be “special”. But no matter how hard I tried to see and to understand what was wrong with my face, I just could not see anything wrong with it. Because my mind had not been successfully programmed up to that point to actually believe what everybody was saying, that because some women (or men) looked a certain way they were special, and because some women (or men) didn’t look that certain way, they weren’t special. I need to become confident enough in this knowledge to never feel pain and hurt over how someone perceives me based on my looks.