My face

It seems like the last, oh, I don't know, several months of self portraits I've managed to avoid showing my face. Even here I'm partly shrouded by my hair (my safety blanket) and the shade.

I mostly don't have an issue with my face. I mean, I don't freak out when I look in the mirror. I see me, I think, in the mirror--an almost 50 year old woman who looks (mostly) her age. I don't have a problem with this. A lot of times, I actually think I'm kind of pretty.

What I do get hung up on is my face in photos. I don't feel like what comes out of the camera is what I see in the mirror. The lens is different from the mirror. The camera image is static. I wonder if maybe in the mirror we make little adjustments to avoid really seeing the parts we don't agree with, the lines or droops or pocks or dark spots? The camera is unforgiving, but the image is real. We can change those things in editing, of course. But then are we lying to ourselves?

I don't have an answer to being okay with my face in photos. I know I don't have to show my face in every self portrait as this is a creative project. But I also know that there are parts of me I feel self-conscious about and part of what I want in this project is to get over that, to see the beauty (yes, beauty!) in those parts that I sometimes don't love.

Jane wrote about this in her last post. I think we say and feel a lot of the same things regarding facing ourselves, and we're not unique. It may be a universal plight of the aging woman. Do we need to face the loss of our youth? Yes. Do we need to agree to the loss of beauty? No, I don't believe so. I think we have to embrace change in the definition, something more encompassing.