Making Someday…Today

I’m slowly making it through Geneen Roth’s Book Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment. Her books take me a while to get through as they are so packed with epiphanies for me that I often have to pause & journal about just one line or paragraph before continuing on.  That is the best kind of book in my opinion (though I’m realizing after renewing this book from the library 3 times and I’m still not done…I just might need to buy it).

Today the chapter I was reading was about our parallel lives, the way that we create these other lives for ourselves usually referenced by statements “When I’m thin I’ll….” or “When I have success life will be…” or “When I’m loved everything will be…” where we imagine our parallel life and how it would be different if only we were different.

When we focus on our ‘parallel lives’ (which I know I often do) we disconnect from the life we’re living right here and now, seeing it as not enough.

Of course, everything gets channelled through the lens of “How does this relate to self-portraiture & self-love” in my brain these days (I can’t help it….I just love this work so much)!

It got me thinking of the way many of us save being in photographs until we are _____________ (lose weight, have a haircut, get better at doing our make-up, have a new outfit, have cooler shoes, etc).

I thought I’d share one of these moments I had lately which arose in the process of putting up a profile for online dating.  I though I should get my photos taken.  You know, confident, sassy, ‘the new me’…ready-to-date photos.

Of course that would involve getting my haircut first. Oh, and what will I wear?  I imagined how awesome the photos would be.

I mean, a fun thought and all…but it quickly became a gigantic list of all the things I’d need to do to get that perfect photo.  It became something very distant and became a “When I do this I’ll be ready to date” which of course meant I had to do all these things to be ready.

Yes, my parallel life was happening right there, that I’d be ready to date and I’d find love if only I had the perfect photos to make it happen.

For reals, this was my thought process.  Yes, even though I am indeed a self-portrait photographer.  Indeed, even though I have a computer full of photos that were not only perfectly fabulous to use for a dating profile, but in fact were representative to me of the journey to find confidence again.  Photos that came from my journey to see myself with love and that I already felt beautiful in.

Of course, after a while I had to call myself out on this, and now have 2 photos up on a profile (trying to make some steps towards dating this year) both of course, self-portraits that I took during a session of Be Your Own Beloved.  I figure if I am learning to see myself with love in these photos, then they are absolutely the right ones to put on a dating profile!  Oh my…I actually can’t believe I’m telling you this story, but it kind of cracks me up in retrospect!

So I thought I’d ask you…do you have any photo related ‘parallel lives’ that are holding you back from just picking up the camera here and now and just sharing a photo that feels present with where you are at today?

If we shift away from saving taking a self-portrait for when our body changes, or we look “better” or we get the right outfit to finally invite ourselves into the frame?  What would happen if we just let ourselves be enough to step into a self-portrait today?

If you happen to read this and pick up your phone or camera and just go for it and take a self-portrait…use the hashtag #beyourownbeloved so I can see it and cheer you on)!