Skills Lacking

This will be unclear and indeed seem unlikely to those of you who have never met me in real life, nonetheless it is true - I don't really do photos! Pictures of other people, fine. Pictures of me? Not so keen frankly. Let me tell you more.

I have always been a bit of a camera dodger. When I was a kid, I had chubby cheeks. The kind of cheeks that strangers would come up and squeeze (painfully usually - thanks old dudes), the kind of cheeks that make you think of hamsters stashing seeds, the kind of cheeks that obliterate your eyes should you happen to smile for a photo. I happen to like my eyes - they are the one feature that I genuinely think is quite pretty - and didn't want them hidden and so developed a very stern photograph demeanour. Childhood holiday photos from the age of seven through to twelve would indicate (wrongly) that I didn't have a single moment of joy.

I then declined to be photographed at all because alongside the chub of the cheeks, there were the various bodily farces that make up puberty. It was, as it often the way, not pretty. I can think of only one photo of me that exists from around that time and it was taken by stealth while I was playing badminton and thus caught off guard. All I can say about that picture is that is was 1990, the fashion of the time was "baggy" and I may or may not have been wearing dungarees, high tops and the largest t-shirt known to man. Body confidence not an issue because who ever knew what was lurking under the giant swathes of material.

There are no more pictures till my 18th birthday when I was forced to submit to a single shot. For reasons which will never be clear, my father had me pose next to my mother's new car like some dolly bird from The Price Is Right. Looking at that picture you might surmise that the car was perhaps my birthday gift (but you'd be wrong. Not so much as a driving lesson despite my father being a driving instructor - go figure). Car bizarreness aside, it's actually very nice. Not because I'd learned to smile nicely for a photo but purely on the basis that I look young and vibrant. My boyfriend at the time was taking me out for a nice fancy dinner and I was properly dressed up - sexy dress, high heels, make up even and I still had my ridiculously long pre-Raphaelite hair (because you can just about still get away with that at 18).

But as I said, that was an extreme rarity. There are really very few photos of me in the years that followed. Hardly any even of me with my son when he was a baby (a million of him obviously, but I'm barely in any of them). Looking back that saddens me - it seems like he gets bigger by the day and it's harder and harder to look at him and try to see the baby that he was. A bit more evidence would have been nice in retrospect but at the time, it was a no go. One photo was taken not long after I had brought him home from the hospital. In it are me, my mum with the baby on her knee and my older sister. I just look like a mountain of human flesh. I had given birth five days earlier and I bloody well looked like it. Breasts like rugby balls and no waist whatsoever, everything else just huge! This is not a "poor me, I had some post-baby fat" statement. What I want to illustrate is the importance of looking at that picture ... and having absolutely no connection to the woman in it. I was completely lost inside that body.

Every family has their own little set of dynamics that go on. You know who's the brightest, the thinnest, who has the biggest feet, who takes longest in the shower of a morning. So it is in my family: I am the tallest (yes really, we are a hobbity bunch) and the slimmest. It seemed that overnight I had become something else, some fat hunched thing that had no bearing on who I really was. Nonetheless, it did appear to be me in that photo and that was so deeply uncomfortable that I couldn't bear to look at myself in a photo again. At least a reflection is fleeting, a photo is just there, not going anywhere, unavoidable. If you don't like yourself, you're not going to willingly submit to that (self) scrutiny.

And so for many more years there were no photos, save a couple where I was on a night out and not aware of the camera. Unfortunately, I had also been drinking and boy, does it show in my face (you can tell from my eyes instantly). Thus they are beastly looking things and the whole horror of photo and self was reinforced.

I am a bit of a one for Facing Your Fears (I have to be since some days I am scared of damn near everything). It occurred to me that apart from being totally ridiculous, avoiding looking at myself was no way to proceed. This is my body, this is my mind - I cannot work with them and improve them if I don't know them and check in on their progress from time to time. I will freely admit that the thing I used to find most intimidating about the gym was the amount of mirrors in there - now I couldn't care less. This is simply down to exposure - look at something long enough and you will get used to it. Look at it for a bit longer still and you'll start to see the improvements you've made, where your hard work is paying off (this is why doing pull ups in your underwear is so very good but keep that to home workouts, yes?). There are frequently times when it goes beyond acceptance and straight out the other side to "oh, that's a nice body" and not quite recognising it as your own. In that sense, I haven't solved the disconnect. My mind is taking a long time to catch on to what I actually look like and I wear evidence of this most days. I am not the most patient of clothes shoppers and if there's a queue for the fitting room, I mostly likely won't join it. I'll just kind of look at the clothes and decide whether I think I'll fit in them or not. This means that I have a large number of clothes (jeans especially) that don't fit. In my head, I seem to be a size or two bigger than I really am. I don't yet feel that I am the woman in the size 8 skinny jeans but they're the ones that fit. So I haven't got things quite right yet but they are vastly improved. I can look at a photo and not immediately want to curl up and die - this is good and something of a miracle.

What is not so good is that lack of practice means I have no clue how to pose properly. I have been taking progress pics of my abs and it's not nearly so easy as it would appear.  I can't do good face and good body at the same time! If I tense my abs, my face looks constipated. If I think about the face, I forget to stand right. That doesn't even take into account trying to tame the crazy hair. Currently I am just cropping the bits that offend me most :) I think though, that it might be time to just get on with it and polish up my skills. Particularly for when I reach the end of my challenge, it would be good to have a really nice set of pics. I'll need to practice a bit (and get some shots in daylight for instant added definition). In the mean time, here's roughly where I'm at abs wise: