Can I Grow Accustomed To My Face?

That might seem like a stupid question. I'm 43 years old today and I've had my face all my life but still when I have my picture taken I often feel unhappy about how my face looks. Lots of people are the same way, I know because I've asked around. People take selfies over and over to get one they think is good enough. People untag themselves from pictures on Facebook because they don't like how they look. Plenty of people don't even use a picture of themselves on Facebook to avoid the pressure of it. People go on diets to change their face shape or even more drastically have plastic surgery. It seems really important to lots of people that they present the best picture of themselves for everyone else to see. Including me!

Any other person might decide to do something about changing how their face looks. I'm going to try change my attitude about my face and grow to love it instead.

I'm going to take a selfie every day for a month. Just one picture a day and even if I don't like how I look I'm going to post it anyway. No excuses, no getting out of it.

In fact I've already started 10 days ago in preparation for this post. The first picture was terrible. My eyes are closed, my neck looks fat and my hair isn't how I like it to be. Usually this photo would never see the light of day. Delete delete delete.

Here it is though:

I cried when I saw it because I was starting off my challenge with a terrible photo. It's exactly the point of the challenge but still I wanted to delete it and take a better one. The ridiculous thing is that many people see me like this every day but having a still photo seems to make it worse. We all want control over how we look in pictures so we can portray our best selves. The thing is that I sometimes have my eyes closed, I do have a fat neck and my hair isn't always how I'd like it to be. That's my reality and I'm quite happy to wander through life looking that way. So why does a photo like this upset me?

I carried on through the next ten days taking more photos in various places, one at work, one at the bus stop and one with Erin. I put them in this handy collage.

The first few I can see in my face that I'm annoyed to be taking a selfie but as the days went by I do actually look happier with taking the pictures. And that seems to improve how I look to myself.

This is my latest one:

So far I'm not sure if I like how my face looks more or if I've just got better at taking pictures of myself. So I'll carry on for 20 more days and see what happens.

Do you like how you look in photos?