Selfie

I’ll say it once, nice and loud for you all to hear:

"I want to see your face, but I don’t want to see your face THAT much."

Some pictures of you on hols,

hanging out with friends,

trying out new make up,

and definitely with cool clothes on.

But fill my newsfeed with twenty of the same posed,

but trying to be natural shot

With sepia, willow, X Pro II and every other filter under the sun

And I will delete you.

I rarely put up selfies.

If I do,

they either contain my sidekick Zella:

Or me doing some ridiculous face:

No one wants to see just my normal face.

No one.

Putting a picture up of me,

just out there,

puts me on display.

Exposes me.

I remember being pregnant and getting requests from friends far away desperate to see my ever burgeoning bump, and I recoiled in fear, scared of comments I would get.

What if they didn’t think I was pretty?

Me with Zella? Well you have to think that’s cute.

Me with a stupid grin? Well you just have to laugh.

Me. Just me.

Well…what if it doesn’t get “likes”?

The truth is

Behind the newsfeed full of posed photos

Or the one devoid of them

There sits a woman with phone in hand

Girl with laptop

Lady staring at a screen

With a beauty to unveil

Wondering if anyone will see it

Notice it

Care about it

Love it

Bikini jumping at beach, ghetto twerking poses, inappropriate Halloween outfits

It all screams:

Do you see me?

Baggy clothes dragging, dark hair over eyes, scar marks on arms

It all screams

Do you see me?

We first became undone

That 1800s day

When we looked up from the bathroom sink

And our reflection stared back at us.

And then when the weighing scales,

that once resided so neatly on kitchen counters,

or so officially in doctors offices,

Encroached into our homes

With constant reminder

That we didn’t measure up

We weren’t the right fit

We unravelled further

My teeth aren’t straight.

I was too scared to get my teeth taken out,and so the orthodontist couldn’t put braces on, and I look at my wedding photos, and regret that moment of teenage worry that means my mouth isn’t Colgate ad worthy.

My body feels weird.

Early puberty meant that since age 11 I’ve been this size, this weight, but yet I never quite got a grasp on it, and justas I started to feel comfortable, pregnancy attacked it, and now bits have got bigger, and bits have got smaller; unwelcome visitors in a place I’d just started to feel at home with.

But I cling onto the words that my Father God continually impresses upon me:

I am beautiful.

And that is not determined by merely the outside.

A 1900s girl,

without the trappings of adverts and angst,

described herself

based on her character

her skills

her attributes.

She was not to be described as merely the sum of her body parts

So on Saturday afternoon,

humbled with a clumsy hot chocolate wetting through my lap,

the girls and I wrote,

the beauty we saw in oneanother.

This is my real selfie:

The irony that the same teeth that repel me,

Are seen by another as “beautiful smile” 

And that what makes a difference

In the lives of others

What makes the permanent change

In communities

Is not the colour of my eyes

The outfit I wore last week

My waist size

But my personality

My gifts

My heart

So girl with photos

Cluttering my newsfeed

You won’t get deleted today

Because 

just like me

You just want to know you're beautiful.