The Camera Doesn't Lie: My relationship with photographs

 So to give some context for this post. As a trans guy, I find that my relationship with my body image is somewhat shaky. The vast majority of the time I am somewhat unhappy with the way I look although for the most part I'm not unhappy enough to consider using a knife to carve my body into the shape I want it to be in. Terrifying idea, yes but one I have definitely considered on more than one bad day. For the most part, I manage to keep my unhappiness levels down by avoiding seeing myself. If I don't see any reflection of myself either through a mirror or a lens then I can't scrutinise everything that's wrong and go down the deep, dark path that is potentially very self-destructive.

For the most part, I find myself avoiding mirrors these days. Now that might sound tricky, I mean, how can you go through day to day life without coming in contact with your reflection? Well, I'll admit to using them but I want see all of myself in one. If I need to style my hair then I will look at my hair and mentally blur out everything else. Even then I'll try to keep the encounter with my reflection as short as humanly possible. In other words, I survive for the most part by seeing myself in pieces (although certain pieces are too upsetting alone so I just don't deal with them) but sometimes I can manage to look at myself in a mirror as a whole. On such days, I might feel particularly pleased and find myself scrutinising my reflection, marvelling at how I can see something of myself on the outside that has always been internal. On such days of body positivity, I want to share my joy with the world and save such moments for me to look back on in the future. It's not just for everybody else but for me too. It means that when I have a bad day in the future, I can look back on images and see how good I felt in those moments and how it radiated from me. How in those moments, I look more  like I feel inside because my joy projects it outwards. It's fabulous but I find that I can look back on old joys less and less to re-experience them.

This morning, while in my Grandad's house, I found myself face to face with a reflection that I didn't mind so I decided to capture it, to take some selfies and declare to my friends that today I feel good about who I am. The thing is, I have a hard time coming to grips with photos of myself. There's something about cameras that when they take your picture, they immortalise something very true about yourself. You can deny to yourself, lie to your very face if it's animated but once it's frozen in a photograph, there are things you can't hide. They say that the camera doesn't lie, which is true as far as I'm concerned. Sure, you can manipulate photos, use filters so that the outcome will be different but the naked lens tells no lies. I took pictures, so many pictures and deleted every single one because I could see the vulnerability on my face, see the insecurity I was really feeling because I wasn't actually confident in that moment. I'd tricked myself into thinking I was but once the image was taken, I could see doubt and fear..

It doesn't matter if I'm not the one to take the picture. It doesn't matter if the photo is staged or if I'm taken by surprise, the camera always reveals how I truly feel in that moment. If you snap me.when I'm out with people you'll always catch me acting, trying to be a version of me that won't freak other people out. Always trying to make sure that I react in the right way emotionally and trying to make sure that my face isn't expressing something it shouldn't be. I will hate most people for tagging me in things because they've automatically exposed the Internet to a picture of me that  I either haven't seen yet and therefore don't know if it's safe, or else one that I've seen and don't want anyone's attention, including my own, drawn to ever again. It's not a matter of embarrassment, it's a matter of near physical pain.

I basically had to have a little rant because I only fully realised this today and I just needed to get it out there.