a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by coffeesp00ns
coffeesp00ns  ·  3749 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I refuse to let my pictures get taken. Why should I change this?

I think the pictures are irrelevant. What I read into here is that your camera shyness comes from a sense of being ashamed of yourself in some way.

A bit of TMI that helps me explain my point - I had a very large beard for a very long time. Indeed, I was quite proud of my beard and its dishevelled appearance. Then I realized something - I had stopped looking in the mirror. Almost immediately, I asked myself why I didn't look in the mirror, and the answer was that I didn't like what I saw. Indeed, I hated what i saw there. As is expected, that lead to some serious introspection and and self-examination, and forced me to come to terms with some things I'd been grappling with for a long time. It also lead to me shaving my beard.

I don't mean to assume that you are not a self-examining person, or that you have some deep-seated shit you need to deal with, But I do think that asking yourself why looking "clumsy" (indeed, how exactly DOES one look clumsy? what do you see?) is something that you are ashamed of seeing in a photograph of yourself.

I also think reason #3 is not a thing that you are really that worried about, but is a stand-in for other more interior reasons to not want your picture taken. I think that it's a beard to cover up things you either don't want to say or don't want to admit. If you're responsible enough to worry about #3, then it's unlikely you'll be irresponsible enough to be caught in a position where you're too drunk to know not to have your picture taken and put online for millions to see.

#4 is a reasonable thought taken to the extreme.

    I feel really uncomfortable not knowing what people know about me

is telling however, mostly because I think I've used the same excuse to distance people from the parts of myself that I hated or was uncomfortable with.

As someone once said to me - you don't have to love yourself. Try not hating yourself first.