“What was that?” Hallie’s voice, bristling with indignation, scraped along my ear canal.
“What was what?” Most of our conversations start somewhere in the middle, and usually, I can pick up the thread. This time I had no clue.
“That picture!” Horror replaced indignation, quickly melting into dismay. “I don’t know what you were thinking. You are so photogenic! There are so many good pictures of you!”
I let the inaccuracies in her statement lie, in an effort to discern the source of her distress.
“Honey? I don’t know what you’re talking about. What picture?”
“On the blog! That horrible picture on the blog!”
“Oh, you mean the one in the bathrobe?”
“No! There was no bathrobe! Just your face; your tired, haggard, sick looking face! Why would you do that, honey?”
“You must be talking about the one in the bathrobe. I took it as a favor to a friend. It fit where I placed it in the blog.” My voice reflected the fatigue I felt at having to explain, yet again, why I had taken the picture.
“No! There is no bathrobe!”
“Ok, do you mean the one at the beginning? The one where the little boy is shaking his fist?” I struggled to remember the boy’s face. Could he have resembled me?
“No! There is no little boy, and no bathrobe; just you, looking tired and hurt and ready to die!”
The conversation ended with my friend promising to send me a copy of the offending photo, and it was as I had thought, my early morning picture.
Later that evening, another friend shared his opinion. Where she saw tired and haggard, he saw quiet and pensive. Instead of current illness, he saw tempered strength brought about by obvious wounds. He liked the picture, he said, because he felt it a true reflection.
For a time, I was struck by this difference of opinion between two people who know me as well as anyone, until I realized they both saw the same thing. The difference was acceptance.
Hallie’s view mirrored my own. I am seldom satisfied with a photograph of myself. On a recent occasion in which I was called upon to provide a current photo, I took fifty shots before settling on one I felt was passable. I can always find something wrong. My eyes don’t look right. The lines around my mouth are too obvious. My hair isn’t messy enough.
But it’s really not about physical appearance. It’s about vulnerability. It’s about being stripped down, and allowing the real to show.
The eyes don’t look right because they are sad. The lines around the mouth tend to drift unflatteringly, and messy hair provides a pleasant distraction from the rawness of a well-traveled face. And, all of this is difficult to show and unpleasant to see.
The friend who saw sick and tired, knew the pain first-hand, and couldn’t bear being reminded. The friend who saw quiet and pensive, viewed with accuracy, from a distance.
And, both are right.
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Are We There Yet? 