I hate photographs. I know I am not the only one, and these days, for the sake of others who want to capture memories I submit without too much open protest to being photographed in groups. Friends who know me well are merciful these days and usually don't insist too much if I quietly demur or offer to take the picture in group situations. I still occasionally have friends who find it hard to believe that I really don't like it or who with the best of intentions will send me photos of myself.
To close friends I am often brave enough to admit now that, at the wrong moment, unexpectedly being confronted with a picture of myself will make me feel physically sick. That's not hyperbole. Literally, physically, sick. Independent really of the situation or my relative appearance. I don't see what they see when they look at the photograph and they don't realise that I only manage to exist and enjoy my life because I constantly, consciously don't think about what I look like. Being confronted with a picture reminds me that other people have to look at and relate to what I physically look like all the time.
It's why I hate any occasion for which I need to get dressed up. I have to think about what I look like, the physical me that people have to relate to. In order to start enjoying myself I have to get to the point where I have 'lost' myself again, when I can forget that I physically exist and what it is that people are looking at when they look at me. Being dressed up also often involves fitted clothes which constantly remind you of their existence. It lies behind my insistence that if I ever get married I will do so in jeans and with no photographer. The wedding dress is the ultimate expression of clothing that is designed to focus attention on your appearance. Most of my friends don't really understand the extent of the misery and discomfort looking at myself causes me, so they don't understand why I would be willing to sacrifice convention, propriety and being the centre of attention in order to avoid constantly being reminded on a supposedly happy day what it is that others are looking at.
Self-image is so wrapped up in layers and layers of shame for me, that I am reluctant to admit how I feel about what I look like. I am ashamed of my shame. So over the years I have cultivated deliberate self-forgetfulness. Forget about what you look like, dismiss the thought, consciously reject thinking of yourself as a physical person, or in fact thinking about yourself at all and then you don't have to be self-conscious, you can be focussed on others. Photos, mirrors, reflections in shop windows, getting dressed up, thrust that physicality back onto you and you have to push it away, reject it again before you can be comfortable. I can never accept myself, only forget myself.
I know I am relatively extreme, but not unique in any sense. It is an aggravated degree of something many people, particularly women, experience all the time. As humans we are constantly bombarded with messages about who we are. From the subconscious clues of the way people relate to us, to the images and representations that surround us, to the actual words that people use to describe us. We absorb and assimilate expectations, judgements. We are constantly being told who we are and who we should be by the world around us. Physical self-image is bound up with moral judgements on ourselves, when I look in the mirror I don't just see what I physically look like and the accompanying physical judgements, I see all of the world's judgements and my own judgement's reflected back at me.
Until I was 22 or so, those judgements would be profoundly uncomfortable for a stranger to listen to. Physically what I saw was ugly, disgusting, unfeminine. More generally I was worthless, dirty, unloved and un-loveable. I had absorbed the world's judgements about myself. Self-mutilation was easy, self-disgust could fuel days and days of not eating. I wanted to cut my face, to write the judgements I had absorbed in plain sight for others to see, to destroy what I loathed and made me feel sick. I managed not to do that, in the end my shame at how I felt overcame the desire for public exposure of it.
I know this makes uncomfortable reading. It makes uncomfortable writing. So why am I writing it? Because of course it is not the whole story, only the beginning of it. I am friends with Jesus so it's where I start, but not where I end. The world told me a story that if I wanted to be loved I needed to, "Be beautiful, Be funny, Be smart but not too smart, Be successful, Be smiley, Be popular, Be fashionable, Be desirable, Be thin, Be quiet". And then it told me I was none of those things. I was a failure. But praise God he took me in hand and told me a different story. It was a simple one, just this, "You are mine".
It's the claim to silence all claims. The judgement to end all judgements. What and who I am is not the world's to determine, it belongs to God to say. He made me, then he bought me with the blood of his precious Son, only he is worthy to tell me who I am. His is not another voice in the competition of voices telling me who I am, his is the voice. Only he is worthy to tell me who I am. To allow that right to anyone else, including myself, is to dishonour and de-throne him. It may not have been my fault, the things that happened to me that created the voices of judgement in my head, but that I allow them to sound above the Lord's voice, to take his place, and of that I need to repent.
So having allowed that the Lord has the right to define me, to tell me who I am, what is it that he says? Does he have another list for me of things I need to be? No, the Lord Jesus had for me words that would set me free from the weight of the judgement of the world. Isaiah 43 became the scaffolding on which I could start to re-build my identity, re-shape my view of myself into the reflection of who the God made me and died for me told me I was. "Because you are precious and honoured in my sight, and because I love you", began to replace the solid foundational truths of my understanding of myself. I could not be worthless if God said I was precious, I could not be dirty if I was honoured, I could not be unloved if my Lord said, "I surely love you".
Over time the rock of Jesus' words about me became more and more the foundation stone of my identity, I gave up more and more of my judgements of myself to him. I accepted myself because I believed I was accepted, not on the basis of my merits, but by the love that said while you are dirty and guilty and my enemy I will lay down my life for you. On the basis that, "This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins". It's not a completed work, it never will be this side of heaven, there are days that I hear the world's voice as the loudest in my head, coping strategies that I run back to under pressure that reflect the old identity rather than the new.
One thing that remains is the visceral antipathy to my physical appearance. The belief that I am ugly and disgusting and weak because I am overweight, the only thing that I see when I look at a photo, or a reflection. The constant battles with dieting which, like for most people, has absolutely no long term impact. The constant reminder that when it comes to physical appearance I am a failure and it's my own fault, a failure of will, self-discipline, inner strength. I am learning to tame the excesses it leads to. I no longer often skip meals, starving myself part in punishment, part in desperate attempt to make an impact. It never worked anyway. I try to at least start the academic year with the concept that time to cook and eat in my life is a necessity, not an indulgence that I don't deserve. I buy fruit and vegetables that I like, even though it seems like a waste of money to spend on myself, because I am more likely to eat them. I try to remember that however I feel about it, my body is not my own, because I am not my own, I was bought at a price, so I try to take care of it.
But I know the Lord is pushing me on. Challenging me to see not what the world sees, or what I see, but what he sees when he looks at me. Not perfect, not worthy in itself, but acceptable because he accepts it, lovely because it is loved, beautiful because he has found beauty in it, the beauty that he has put there by choosing to love it and therefore giving it some of his own worth and beauty. Pushing me to believe that the inner things are more important than the outer, the unseen is of more value than the seen, that charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but that a women who fears the Lord is to be praised.
I'm not there yet. I still hate photos, still struggle to look at them, but it no longer hurts to hear the verse a dear friend once gave to me inscribed on a bracelet and which I could not read for years and years because I couldn't accept it. Slowly, but slowly the Lord is changing even that deepest truth that I have believed from a small child, that I am ugly. Slowly I am letting him be the arbiter and learning to accept his words when he says: "The King is enthralled with your beauty, honour him for he is your Lord".
