My best friend and I were talking the other day, and she told me about a photography group that she belonged to that held weekly contests.
The prompt- "Up Close Portrait."
She then told me about her favorite entry.
A photographer had chosen to take a photo of her father. In his very old age- every line, every wrinkle, the texture.. every single part of his face told his story.
You can take one look at this picture, and just know.
You can see his journey. The depth of it, the length of it- his strong endurance through whatever this life has thrown at him.
And in his eyes?
You can see that the old man still has plenty of fight left.
This stuck a chord within my heart, and inspired me.
I was curious.
So I decided to take a self portrait.
I wanted to see what story my own face would tell.
Self portraits are challenging and extremely different than getting your portrait taken by someone else- so I didn't even know if it would work. I knew that I might have bitten off a little more than I could chew, but I decided to try it anyway.
The first few pictures came out exactly I as I expected. I looked like a deer in headlights with a frumpy face trying really really hard to take a self portrait that was good but it wasn't lol.
I felt silly. And was about to throw in the towel and just go on with my day. But I decided to take just one more.
Before I took it, I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked long and hard. I looked myself in the eyes.
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I thought about my life.
I thought about the hell that I had been called to walk through during the past year.
The hell that changed everything I believed about my life, shook it furiously and slammed it upside down right in my face.
My childhood.
My relationships.
My confidence.
My strength.
My life now.
Everything.
Ruined.
Destroyed.
I thought about all my counseling appointments with trained therapists. I thought about how they told me I needed to seek medical help in addition to therapy. I thought about the way my doctor looked at me, before he prescribed a surprisingly high dose of anti-depressants.
I thought about my last blog post.
How I revealed to the whole world that I truly believed that my life was a war I couldn't ever win. That everything was stacked against me, that I would just have to endure it until I died.
As I looked at myself in the mirror.
I saw that I have been living my life playing the victim.
I played the victim card and I played it all day long.
I sat around and lay in bed for hours and hours just feeling sorry for myself.
Feeling sorry for my family. Feeling sorry for anything.
Immobilized. Paralyzed. Unable to move forward.
And then feeling nothing. And then feeling hollow.
I lived and breathed defeat.
You know what I've learned?
IT GOT ME NOWHERE.
Playing the victim gets you nowhere, every single time. You can count on it.
IT SOLVED NOTHING.
Playing the victim solves nothing, it changes nothing.
IT ONLY WORSENED IT ALL.
Playing the victim of your life is a self destructive attitude, and you will destroy not only yourself but every relationship in your wake.
My therapists told me that due to the nature of my... circumstance... that it was justifiable to be hurt. It was justifiable to be depressed. It was completely normal behavior.
I took that as a permission slip to play the victim and I ran with it. I did it. And I did it for a long time.
It's been a long, hard year.
But you know what it taught me?
There are three things that you CAN NEVER AND WILL NEVER find outside of yourself.
CONFIDENCE.
COURAGE.
AND STRENGTH.
You can spend your entire life chasing them down but you will always be two steps behind.
They are choices.
True confidence. True courage. True strength- They come from within and from within yourself only.
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While thinking about all of that...
When I felt the true to the core, raw emotion, from deep within, come to my face- I snapped a picture.
And this was the result.
It is my favorite picture I have ever taken.
I wept when I turned my camera around and saw it.
Because of this photo, I have been given the unique opportunity to see my story.
I see every single mark that the exact 8,360 days that I have lived have left on my soul.
And what I find the most invigorating part of this photo, for me, is that I have chosen to shake off the victim.
I'm up on my feet. My shoulders are squared. I've got a burning in my heart...
and I've still got a lot of fight left in me.
-C