How I hate myself in photos always

Or how there only really exists one photo that I like of myself and it's one where I'm typing

There is one photo of myself that I like I am sat at the kitchen table, next to a bunch of flowers, my hands hovering over my laptop. My cat (who has since moved onto cat heaven), is blurry in the background.

Why do I like this photo?

I look genuinely happy

I am doing something I love i.e. writing (well pretending to write for the photographer)

You can’t see my legs

I have always had this strange relationship with images of myself.

I was was cute right up until I turned about eight. Then suddenly my face and body become very round. This roundness continued up until puberty, and then when I hit puberty I looked like a weird version of Arnold Schwarzenegger with a badly shaped wig on (and without his muscles too). It was at this point- the point where boys became important- that life decided I would always be a friend to very good looking people and not a good looking one myself.

The second thing that happened was my best friend was scouted as a model. Now I love this friend and she remains to this day extremely good looking. She’s tall. Cars slow down when she walks. She has freckles which are not painted on with a pen purchased from some Tik Tok influencer. Her shoes match her outfit (I wear trainers no matter what). Anyhoo, we were walking down Camden High Street, it was probably 1987, and a lady approached us. My first thought was she was going to point out where the cheapest home made fudge was being sold (this was something my friend and I always did- ate fudge whilst looking at cool guys and searching out 501 jeans as we were both obsessed with Nick Kamen).

‘Would you be interested in modelling?’ the woman asked my friend.

My friend looked surprised. I was also surprised and I’d like to say happy but let’s be truthful, I wasn’t. I felt sick. Girls are raised from an early age to compete - especially when it comes to beauty. We think that there is only a finite amount of this beauty stuff around, and if there is a woman who is more beautiful in the room then she will suck the 98% of the beauty quota out, and we will be reduced to slugs in her presence and slump off leaving a trail of slug snot behind.

I believe this to be true even in the world of models where, when they are in a group, will each be thinking that they are the slug because the other is the more exquisite example of feminine loveliness.

‘I’m not sure I’m interested,’ my friend said, her face reddening with embarrassment.

‘Well here’s our card,’ the agent said, ‘Call us and let us take some photos and we can take it from there.’

Fast forward a few months and my friend, my best friend was modelling for ‘Just 17’ (like Tik Tok but you could hold it in your hands and take your time reading tips from Wet Wet Wet on dating and there was usually a pull out poster in the middle too). She was doing castings with Vivienne Westwood (who made her run across a dance studio like she was being chased by a madman). She was hanging out with men that looked like Nick Kamen. Before we’d been equals. Two young women navigating our teenager years listening to De La Soul and practicing our graffiti tags. Now she was THE MODEL.

I was the SLUG.

We started going to clubs around that time (we lived before smartphones, and were feral. Our parents had no idea what we were up to or where we were which is possibly how it should be but we can’t go back to those times now). There were a lot of models at the clubs. All of these clubs are now sushi bars or theme pubs.

‘How are you?’ a gorgeous man would ask as I stood sipping my Grolsch beer nodding along to Soul II Soul.

I’d feel that heart quickening feeling that you get when someone so attractive is speaking to you, like you’re no longer in the real world, and are instead floating up somewhere by the ceiling. Then the bomb would be dropped…

‘Can you ask if your friend is interested in speaking to me?’ the model would ask, and he’d gesture towards my best friend who in that moment would be laughing, her white teeth glinting in the lights from behind the bar. And I’d be the slug once more.

Sloppy. Mouldy. Disgusting.

Of course we didn’t live with social media and in essence there are not many photographs that exist of me from this time. If there were you’d see a woman who is continually trying to conceal her body. To make herself smaller in anyway she can. Who sometimes put her hand over her nose and mouth when she laughed because she hated her smile so much.

I avoided cameras. I also anticipated that most men would not be interested in me so when they were I over compensated and was grateful for their attention. This wasn’t a healthy belief and is one that even now makes me listen to men that I have no interest in purely because I believe as a slug that I am lucky they are gracing me with their time and energy at all.

What is the lesson?

Well I’d love to say that I firmly believe that beauty doesn’t matter, and it’s the inside that counts. However if we look around us we see beauty everywhere, and it is even more prized than before. We want everything to look just so and we have a lot of filters to create that illusion. I’d argue that many young girls fantasise about being models or influencers who are basically models like back in the day but they hawk stuff and talk to the viewers watching them. Even now, aged 50 I sometimes fantasise that I will feel a tap on my shoulder and someone will ask me if I want to be on the cover of Red magazine.

Fucking hell.

Having said all of that, I have made peace with some of the tyranny of my own insecurity and the role culture has played in amplifying it. I have one photograph that I like of myself and that is good enough. In it I am the person I’d hoped I would be, the one that was fighting to get out, but didn’t know it yet. I am not a model. Or even married to a model. I am a round-faced, round- bodied, female juggernaut with a ghost spirit cat at my shoulder. I am bathed in colours. The beauty isn’t finite. It reverberates around me like a symphony of tiny clapping hands.