The Curated Self

and how I've not been honest

This Christmas gone, we travelled from South East London to Dublin in the car with our two young children. We have done the same journey with them both a few times now and if we book an early afternoon ferry from Holyhead, we know our best bet is to stay overnight somewhere in Wales the night before. That way the amount of driving either side is achievable, however many meltdowns or mishaps occur.

This year we got lucky driving up, probably due to it being very early in December to leave the country for Christmas, but whatever the reason, I remember my partner sounding very pleased with himself, although slightly cautious, when he said, “That was the easiest journey we have ever had.” I may not have been driving but I knew it already; I felt it in my body. The roads had been smooth, crying in the car was minimal and as a result I wasn’t that drained. We arrived at our pre-booked pitstop in North Wales ahead of schedule and that was after spending time making Christmas cards with the kids in Chester services; it had been a good day.

When we book a hotel we all sleep in the one room, so to make things simpler, I shower whilst my partner reads the boys bedtime stories. That evening, I remember looking in the mirror and being shocked by what I saw. Is that me? Do I really look that old and that tired?

It was an easy journey so I was searching my face confused as to why I looked so exhausted. My face was puffy and my hair dry and fuzzy. It was probably the lighting, I thought. Hotels have terrible lighting don’t they? Too much light – too honest.

The lighting, however, couldn’t be blamed for the unrecognisable shape my body had become. Naked, looking back into the mirror, I saw all manner of curves I didn’t know were there. I’m familiar with the mum pouch that sits under the waist band of my “Mum Jeans”, my stomach like that of many mums has never returned to a firm state. The squishiness of it I had come to celebrate, without it I wouldn’t have my two lovely boys, but it wasn’t just the mum pouch, everything below my belly button seemed like unfamiliar terrain.

A self portrait from my head.

I reasoned that I don’t normally see the whole of myself. My own bathroom mirror helpfully crops out elements of my body, helping me to forget them and perhaps it was just that I was noticing them more now, that I hadn’t seen them for a while. I didn’t feel merely reacquainted, though, but a little shocked. Had I had a big dinner? Maybe it was all the service station food, I wondered, whilst also thinking there was more to it than that.

Both the changes in my face and my body have not happened over night. I am aware enough that my body has changed since having kids that I buy a larger dress size, say from a size I would have bought ten years ago. I have had two children, I remember each one changing my body in different ways. Breastfeeding failures of my first child left me with asymmetrical boobs, which blew up in size and shrunk back to a mini version of their former selves, only to do it all again two years later. I have so many bras that don’t fit. My second son gave me stretch marks, whereas my first didn’t but somewhere in both pregnancies I unknowingly became wider than I once was. My feet too seemed to spread, enough to make my shoes feel uncomfortable to wear but not enough to warrant a whole new shoe size.

I thought I had mostly made peace with these changes, me finally buying jeans that fit rather than trying to squeeze into ones a size too small was proof of that, I thought – emotional growth to accompany my physical growth, yet the body in the mirror was unrecognisable to me. It worried me, especially, that my face didn’t feel like mine and I started to wonder why.

I haven’t been honest

I didn’t recognise myself, because the face in my head is years younger than the face that stared back at me in the mirror. I consider myself an honest person. This whole Substack is based on honesty; if I wasn’t completely open and truthful I wonder what the point of it would be, but the profile photo I use doesn’t look much like me anymore, but it is the me I see in my head. It was taken when I joined my last job in 2017; I would have been 29. The face that looked back at me in the hotel room mirror made it feel more outdated than ever.

I am honest but I’ve not been honest in using that photo, but is it true dishonesty to curate how others see me? Everybody else does it, you only have to be on Linked-In, Instagram or Facebook two minutes to realise actually very few people use current pictures of themselves. It is the sort of curation that may be unintentional, but fits in with the status quo. It is natural to want to put your best face forward, especially for a job. Perhaps it is unreasonable to have expected myself not to have aged, it is like when people accuse Jennifer Aniston or one of the other Friends of looking old as if no time has passed, because the image of them in their twenties is so ingrained our minds.

Anniki Sommerville

writer of ‘Midlifing it’, says of the fascination of the media (and a particular man on Instagram) with Jennifer Aniston, “She is vain because she is trying to chase youth but let’s tear her down because she no longer looks youthful- the media keeps on at her like a snake eating its own tail.”¹

Lyn Slater wrote about a similar experience to mine in her piece Stranger in the Mirror.

“More and more I grew to prefer the person I was online, not my real self in the world. I styled my body with garments while actively disliking the parts of my body they concealed because in the real world, my body was getting older.”

Lyn Slater

, Stranger in the Mirror, How to be Old

I hadn’t realised that I was actively curating what the online me looked like, and by ignoring the parts of me I disliked in real life, like Lyn, I too began to prefer the online me so much so that is who I allow to live in my head.

Curation online is the norm but I didn’t realise that I was curating how I saw myself.

Not many pictures of me exist that show my full body so it is not a surprise that I may not recognise it. Many of the pictures that have been taken of me, especially in the last few years with the boys, have been selfies: a crop of my big smiling face next to their tiny ones. When I am sent a picture of me taken of my entire body, in a group shot or one perhaps I didn’t know was being taken, I will often filter it out, thinking, Oh my hair looks terrible, or I’m not looking at the camera properly there. If there are photos that have been taken of me, very few make the cut to be saved into my collection of photos that I may look through or repurpose. Even when we were away there was a family photo taken in Santa’s Grotto, in which I am standing side-on, I remember thinking I didn’t like how wide I looked or how drab my coat was, I can’t even tell you where that picture is now.

In curating these images I am unintentionally curating memories.

I think of my own mother, and how she appears very seldom in the photos my dad has printed out in a crate in the loft, those taken on film back when we were kids. Occasionally, she’ll appear with us four kids in a line up on a strange hilltop somewhere we haven’t been since, dressed up with newly ‘done’ hair and following a crash diet (she has always been very conscious of her weight) but her appearances are rare. She has edited herself out of those photos based on her own beauty standards in the same way I am doing now and has therefore edited herself out of our memories, out of being there as much as she was.

This is something podcaster Emily Clarkson wrote about on Instagram recently:

“I had to physically stop myself from deleting these pictures when I first saw them, SO quick we are to be SO self-critical that we can disregard a photo in half a second if we don’t feel that we have adhered fully to the ridiculous standards of beauty society expects of us. But I don’t think we realise in doing so, in eradicating a photograph as a retaliation to our own reflection in it, we are sacrificing the memory that it captured and that BREAKS my heart. To lose even the tiniest little details of these staggeringly fleeting moments with this incredible little person, is just too painful a thought.”

Emily Clarkson, @em_clarkson Post dated Dec 4 2023

Our standards of beauty have become ridiculously high. We have curated our social media feeds with filters and omissions to the point where someone who is extraordinarily good-looking is marked as “plain”. This was highlighted in a Substack note by

Mikala Jamison

writer of Body Type:

“There was a viral tweet last week describing this gal (Tate McRae) as “plain”.

“Is this what people think “plain” is?” I asked.

"Yes a lot of people argued, she is “plain”. Someone with flawless skin, a symmetrical face, big eyes, pouty lips and thick hair. “Meh,” they say. “I see girls like her walking down the street every day.”

“No, I don’t think they do. I think they see people like her on their phone screens everyday.”

Tate McRae is “plain”

Mikala goes on to say in her accompanying essay “The era of beauty standard brain rot”:

“A woman who looks like Tate McRae is not not pretty. I have a hard time believing that if you were in a real room with her, you wouldn’t notice her. But more and more, many of us are seldom in real rooms with anyone, so I guess we’ve lost perspective.”

Mikala Jamison

The era of beauty standard brain rot, Body Type

The perspective has been lost in seeing the extraordinary so often we don’t see it as such anymore but expect it. I related to this sentiment when thinking about how I felt about myself when I first became a mum.

After having my firstborn, I found myself staring at the mirror during stolen moments to take a shower, just thinking my face had changed so much overnight. It could have been sleep deprivation, that would surely have physical affects on your face and what you look like, but I wonder if it was the perspective of seeing things differently in the face of new parenthood.

When we first bought T home, I just remember staring at him, his tiny face, in complete disbelief to be honest that he existed. His skin flawless, pale and smooth, he was so tiny too, it maybe made sense then that when I then saw myself in the mirror I was taken back. My face seemed huge. Every texture was amplified as if staring into a magnifying mirror, my freckles stood out and I, who I thought was pale, seemed to have caught the sun (in November!).

A similar thing happened to T when his baby brother C was born two years later. We would have the newest baby in our arms and I would be feeding him and then when I went to change the eldest’s nappy, or get him dressed, I would be surprised by how big he was. Not in the sense that he was suddenly a “big boy” in the way we see preschoolers; so grown up, he looked like a bigger baby, like he had been enlarged and he was suddenly so much heavier.

The perspective shifting between the two different-sized children and between their youth and our aged faces felt like a strange phenomenon at the time, but now I can see it’s happening everyday. Instead of comparing myself to my children, I will now mostly compare myself to the standard of beauty I see everywhere, and this isn’t just online. As a millennial, I know all too well that these standards have been formed in me long before Instagram was invented, with magazines and adverts, all of which try to do better now, but really do they? Even if they put someone not so “perfect” on the cover, they’ll make a big thing about it, highlighting that they have done their bit for diversity. Instagram has merely exacerbated it.

With filters on social media platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok, we are almost directed as to what beauty is. The filter that makes you look “more beautiful”, more symmetrical, slimmer, your skin clearer, make up fuller, eyelashes longer - more beautiful to who? It is they who have set the standard.

I know even that me saying that I feel lesser in thinking that I am bigger is not okay in itself. I want to teach my kids that all bodies are beautiful, yet I am proving in my curation, unintentional perhaps even subconscious, that I don’t actually think that, the learning of the so-called beauty ideal is so ingrained.

In my head I have chosen to see myself as 29 years old, slim and on a good hair day (which if you know me are few and far between!). Whether I intend it or not this is a curated version of myself informed by beauty standards that I see around me and that have been ingrained into my mentality since I was very young. As I age, I am sure that the profile picture will have to change, but it will probably always be ten years younger. A sign not only of impossible beauty standards but of discomfort in ageing.

Madison Huizinga explains that the beauty ideal is never met regardless of whether you are old or young. Women want to be girls, and girls want to be women; each has always wanted what the other has.

“In reality, children have long stolen the lipstick out of their mothers’ vanity drawers and relished in their ages being overestimated. Women have long put their time and energy into home remedies to tighten their skin and winced when asked to recall their birth year. Very little about the anxiety women feel about aging is new - it’s been well-woven into cultures that consider youth and beauty powerful social currencies.”

Madison Huizinga

, Have kids always grown up too fast? Cafe Hysteria

Women longing to be girls, whilst girls seek maturity is something that has been around since long before social media and so it can not be entirely to blame. Madison says, “social media, with its focus on appearance, may heighten these behaviors, as well as simply bring them into sharper focus, better available for us to observe and pick apart in the palm of our hands.”²

Women over a certain age are invisible, not only on social media, but in TV, advertising, film and in the press. Magazines and advertising have long heightened the standard of beauty with unrealistic images often heavily photoshopped. Whilst this is something we are aware of now, and perhaps we may disagree with, it doesn’t mean it is not still happening. The smaller edits maybe the worst: removing a wrinkle here or a grey hair there - edits that over time accumulate and escalate in quantity until again we become shocked at how much someone in the public eye has aged, as if it has happened overnight.

The absence of ageing in popular culture and the press exacerbates the shock of the reality. Strange really, when we know we will age. Lyn Slater captured it beautifully when she wrote:

“Disoriented, I realize with a shock that I too had become someone unrecognizable, yet familiar. A tear crept down my cheek. How could it be that I had never taken the time to imagine her? To know she would eventually come. Why had I not prepared for this day?”

Lyn Slater

, Stranger in the Mirror, How to be Old

Is it that along with the lack of visible ageing in the media, we too have distanced ourselves from ageing people in society. We don’t see our elderly relatives as much as say we may have done in previous generations, we delegate their care, perhaps, or perhaps they are no longer with us, or don’t live close by. Is it that we don’t have a community of people involving a variety of generations and tend to hang around with people our own age?

My response to myself in the mirror that evening in the hotel showed me that I am not familiar with my body any more and that we have in some way become disconnected. I would perhaps have recognised my face and my body is I gave it more airtime, whether that is on social media, as profile pictures or even as Emily Clarkson says, being in the photos and keeping the photos³. We can’t rely on memory alone, and when our children are such a young age it is important to remember that the pictures we will show them of these years will help them to form those stories from their past. Without seeing Mum in the pictures, they may think she wasn’t there, but really she was, she was just out of shot or she didn’t like the photo that was taken of her; she threw it away.

This realisation is making me want to look at my body more, to take it in and notice the details and the changes so that I become more comfortable with myself. It’s making me want to draw and photograph myself in a form of self-portraiture and more so, it’s making me want to make sure those photos of me do exist and that more importantly they are honest. I don’t want to curate my image by omission, I want to be remembered as I am.

I want to end with a quote⁴ and I can only apologise to its originator as I have lost any reference to where it is from. All I know is I read this piece on my phone, on Substack in the middle of January. I thought though it was too fitting not to put it in.

“My body is mine because it’s mine and no one else’s. It is the vehicle through which I experience and navigate living. It is fragile, humble, resilient, defiant. The best thing about my body is that it’s mine. I love it because it’s mine. Acknowledging its beauty comes after.”

And it is, it is beautiful.

If this post resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please do join me in the comments.

Have you ever not recognised yourself in the mirror?
Do you think you could be curating your own self image?
Be honest: how much younger is your profile pic?

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed Distracted please do share this post with a friend.

1.

Anniki Sommerville

of ‘Midlifing it’, quoted from her piece “Jennifer Aniston’s face: why it is symptomatic of our confused narrative around ageing.”

2. Have Kids Always Grown Up Too Fast? Madison Huizinga, Cafe Hysteria (published 7 January 2024)

3. Emily Clarkson quoted from her Instagram post.

4. If this is you please let me know, I will happily amend the post.