Our own harshest critiques
I was thinking about a picture of my father the other day. It was at a friends' wedding, and he had just picked up a plate of food when the picture was snapped.
I will admit that it isn't the best photo ever taken of my dad (He has had professional headshots taken of him), and the candid nature of the picture adds just a dash of surprise to the photo itself.
But it still looks just like my dad.
He hates it. And when I was about to scan it in as part of "Operation Digital Family", he really wished I wouldn't include the photo as it's not the most flattering picture of him.
My mother was the same way, but markedly more militant about having her picture taken. Thus, after her death, we found surprisingly few pictures of the person whom we loved so very much.
So it is that I now ponder how we view ourselves and just how interesting it is that we have such difficulty with pictures of ourselves.
Pictures are reflections that remind us of the person we love... but so often we feel that it is a representation of the person we love, not a reflection...
I wonder, is that because we are so close to ourselves that we feel there is nothing to us but our representation? That we are nothing more than our Avatar? Sort of a twisted "Forest for the Trees" issue?
Do we really feel so shallow to ourselves that we feel we are nothing more than the picture we present?
I wonder what it will take for us to realize that the picture may be worth a thousand words, but it's the words that really matter...
---Me.
posted by Aabh @ 4:43 AM
1 Comments:
Of course not... but there is a logic to emotions too... often based in misunderstanding. I believe that even in the most irrational explaination there is a logic.
That's why I don't buy the "Women are just emotional and therefore impossible to understand by men" thing. I believe that the more you can express yourself, the less "Irrational" you become. We have had many thousands of years of practice telling women to be quiet. I believe that has fostered a core of "irrationality". You can't just say: "I don't like having pictures taken of me because I feel ugly" (to some degree, my mother's rationale) because we will rebut it (Or worse, she'd have to admit it -right or wrong- to herself), so instead she got strange and... um... strange... and it never made sense to me.
But I can understand feeling ugly, that's normal in a society where looks are held in so high a regard. Not right... but normal.
I got upset when I, too, realized I was falling for this trap... I am trying to fix that now... but it may be a while...
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