73. Take the Selfie

If you ever catch yourself looking at your face, it’s wrinkles, it’s discoloration, it’s…WHATEVER, and have a negative word to say about yourself, we suggest taking a selfie. It’s a simple way to love yourself. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

 Nora McInerny: Imagine right here that there is a black and white photo. 

Against a gray sky, four young women smile down at you, as though they’ve gathered around to wake you from a coma.

Is this heaven? No. It’s a summer afternoon in Mound, MN circa 1939. On the banks of the purifying waters of Lake Minnetonka, my grandmother, her sister and their two girlfriends smile into the lens of a camera.  

They are young, joyful, survivors of The Great Depression who are on the cusp of marrying and then sending their young husbands off to war.

We don’t know how they took this photo, or how they did it. Did my they ask someone to lay down and take it for them, or did they invent the selfie?

For most of time, we didn’t have language for the act of turning the lens on oneself. We didn’t have forward facing digital cameras that would show us what we were taking photos of. I have boxes somewhere filled with blurry foreheads or chins from turning a disposable camera towards my friends and I and hoping for the best.

Ten years ago, “selfie” was the Word of the Year and the butt of the joke. 

It was easy to make fun of people for taking a photo of themselves out in — gasp! — public. People using selfie sticks fell into the Grand Canyon or stepped into traffic and the “joke” was, I guess, that’s what you get! For taking a photo of yourself?? 

I’m sure I judged people for this, too. Judging people is fun! It’s exhilarating to find a new way that you’re superior to a stranger!

But then you’re the stranger, and you’re the person wondering if people are judging you. If they think you’re full of yourself, or shallow, or vain for smiling into your phone and listening for the click of a digital shutter.

I took more selfies in 2015 than any year of my life, and I can tell you why: to remind myself that I still existed. I was young and widowed and the person who loved and saw me most in this world had also been the person who took my photo, who always caught me not in my best light but in a light.

Which brings us to 2023.

It’s the Summer of Selfies, and that means it’s time for me to step up on my soap box and evangelize about why you can and should be taking photos of yourself.

I have heard from women that they don’t take photos because they don’t like their face or their body.

That they wouldn’t post a photo because someone out there would judge them, would perceive them as being full of themselves, self-obsessed, of being desperate for validation or thinking too highly of themselves and their appearance.

Let them.

Let them think you’re full of yourself. That you can’t get enough of yourself. That you wake up every day and marvel at the fact of your existence. That you look at yourself in the mirror and say “hell yes.” That you are so in love with yourself that you simply must turn on your phone, flip the camera and find the right lighting and angle to document the moment. 

Let them imagine that you’re obsessively in love with roll, every wrinkle, every rogue chin hair. Let them talk amongst themselves about the absolute horror of a person living in the last gasp of civilization finding a small modicum of comfort in the affirmations of friends and strangers online taking milliseconds to double-tap an image.

Let them call you shallow or vain, because you’ve been called worse by better, and because if it’s shallow and vain to take a moment to appreciate the small amount of time you get to spend on this earth, then you’re going to be shallow and vain.

Let them scroll on by, or send it to a mutual “friend” who will reply with an eye roll. Give them something to talk about, parched as they are for topics to connect on, and let it be you.