It seems anywhere you go these days the odds are pretty good that you will catch someone taking a selfie. What’s a selfie? Well, Oxford Dictionaries just named it the 2024 Word of the Year, and defines it as, “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”.
Honestly I think selfies get a bad rap. I think often times people look at others who take selfies and write them off as possibly being arrogant, full of themselves, and at times down right annoying. We, as a society, are quick to judge others from the outside without actually knowing the story that person has to share.
You see, for me, selfies have a unique meaning. I have been overweight for most of my adult life; the picture below was me at my highest weight in 2024 at 480 pounds.
I don’t have a lot of pictures of myself from that period of my life; the reason being I was scared of the camera. I didn’t want to capture myself or what I looked like. I didn’t want to see the reality of what I had done to myself. At social functions when people would pull out their cameras wanting to capture the moments, I would mysteriously disappear or be that awesome person who volunteered to take the pictures for everyone else.
There were even a few times when people would sneak up and take pictures and I would kindly ask them afterwards to please delete any of the pictures I was in; they never really understood why.
The bottom line was I was not happy with many aspects of my life and I didn’t want proof of that published in the form of a picture as a constant reminder. (more…)
