Kimberlee K.

As a whole, I’m trying to be kinder to myself.

To smile big in pictures, unashamed of the way my eyes squint and the vein in my forehead appears when I’m really happy. Both because it’s the way my grandma smiled and because it’s a blessing to be happy.  

I’m trying to look at pictures as a whole—at the moment being captured, the occasion, the small glimpse I’m giving future me into the now. This once in a lifetime now that, while complicated and hard and confusing and scary, is also quite wonderful.

But sometimes I’ll need a day or two.

I’ll feel the habitual criticisms rise up, desperate for me to notice the presumed flaws—the parts of me that are “wrong”—and I’ll instead put the pictures away, as if in a time out, so that I might return to them with a better mindset, a better appreciation of what they represent.

I don’t want to look at pictures thinking, look how bad my—or—I need to exercise—or—I should cut cal—no. I want to think, look at my family, my friends, my life and the good parts of it that I remembered to stop and capture and memorialize.

So I’m trying to be kinder.

To be gentler.

To remember it’s not my job to be perfect, it’s not even my life’s work.

But with all that being said, there are pictures that I don’t want to see.

Pictures I hope aren’t stored somewhere. Pictures that, no matter how kind I might strive to be or ever become, I wouldn’t want to put to the test.

Like the face ID that I willingly let unlock my phone seconds after I wake up, when one of my eyes is still half shut and I’ve leant just high enough away from my crumpled pillow for the software to recognize me.

Or the face ID that buffers as I hover over my phone at the gym to check what exercise is next in the circuit, the baby hairs along my forehead spiking out like a troll doll, my cheeks red, and the hormonal breakout on my jawline a radical pink.

It’s mostly face ID’s, now that I think about it, but in a world of surveillance, I also shudder at the concentration face I surely make in every self-checkout line, my tongue poking into the side of my cheek as I try to find the barcode on cottage cheese.

I pray the flat lipped smile I offer the TSA camera—which in turn captures the lowest maintained version of myself that I morph into on a long travel day—is deleted quickly, and that I don’t meet a harsh fate that instead spreads it across news cycles for years to come.

Heaven forbid someone ever shows me what I look like warping my mouth during X-rays at the dentist. Opening and biting down, saying, “ahhhh,” under the fluorescents while the radiation guards flatten me like a pancake and the eye protection makes me look like a new arrival to earth.  I can only hope that allowing the hygienist to overshare while shoving her hands in my mouth is payment for her discretion.

While I’ve already seen my passport photo, and try to slide it across the customs counter like it’s a secret note to a crush, I’d appreciate never knowing the meek, terrified face I bear when they ask me questions in an intentionally intimidating tone. Namely since it broke an officer at the Canadian border into a full fit of laughter.

There are simply sides of me that feel like none of my business.

And while I want to get better at seeing a picture of my friend and I, happy to be reunited after months apart, without critically picking apart my body, I don’t need a picture of the face that recently made a Pilates instructor ask, concerningly, “are you okay?”

While I’m intentionally teaching myself to focus on the capability of arms that can hold my niece and nephew rather than their lack of tone, I never have any intention of learning what I look like sitting on the crinkly paper at the doctor’s office, hunched like a goblin in an awkwardly tied medical gown.

This is the ignorance, I feel, that is true bliss.