In defense of the narcissism of the selfie

I’ve never really been on board with selfies. If you’ve read my adaptation of The Green Bird, you know there’s a running gag with a narcissistic character doing the period equivalent version of a selfie. When my cousins were teens and they used to post hundreds and hundreds of selfies a day or spend hours in the bathroom taking pictures, I couldn’t even remotely relate. But while I don’t think I’ll ever be on board with the national selfie obsession (or the pictures of food, while we’re on this topic), since I got a smartphone I have taken a few pictures of myself. And here’s why… 

Growing up, my mom was always the one that took the pictures. We have all these wonderful pictures from family vacations and holidays… with my mom only rarely in sight. As soon as I was old enough to become aware of this, I tried to correct it by taking the pictures myself… but that just meant I wasn’t in them. Now that I have my own family, I’m still the person most likely to think of grabbing the camera and while that means there are hundreds of fantastic shots of my daughter and the rest of the family… I rarely make it in the shot.

To be in the pictures, I’d have to ask someone specifically to take it for me so I can be in one and that’s never not awkward and uncomfortable. It also feel super narcissistic (there’s that word again) to ask someone to take a picture of you, particularly to redo a group shot so that you can actually be included. So there’s a good 10 year stretch from when I moved out of my parents’ house and started my adult life where there are barely any pictures of me and what few there are from group shots and strangers are terrible. (Side but related rant: After a lifetime of seeing pictures of yourself taking by someone who is taller than you, such as my mom, if suddenly your only photographer is super short AND leans over to take the pictures, such as, say, someone else’s mom,  so they’re shooting awkwardly up from under you, you’re going to acquire a collection of photographs where you look both super weird and nothing like yourself.)

It’s always bothered me but it hit a whole new level when I became a mom because I realized history was repeating itself. There are so few pictures of me from the beginning of my daughter’s life but a zillion of my husband and everyone else in her orbit and I didn’t want her to look back and think I wasn’t there when, really, most of the time I was the only one there. Moreover, I’m not getting any younger and even on my worst day, I still probably look much better now than I will in a few decades and I’d like to be able to remember myself now, damn it. I also wonder to what extent this is a woman/mom invisibility thing because as much as it always bothered me that my mother wasn’t in the pictures so I would try to get her in more… my dad and brother certainly never exerted that same effort or seemed as troubled by it.

Enter the selfie. Suddenly, I could just take a picture of my damn self without having to ask someone else and then have it corrupted by their weird photography quirks. I don’t have the patience to do more than one or two takes so it takes half a second and, even if I don’t look perfect, suddenly I exist again on a photographic level. It’s such a small thing but it’s made such a difference where I feel like I’m finally back in the frame of my own life. And when the little one and I are snuggling and I capture the moment with a snap of the two of us instead of just her, it’s nice to know that wherever I am in the future, she’ll look at these and know that Mama was here too.

Is it narcissistic to want there to be a record of your face? Your existence? Probably. But no more so than being a writer and thinking that anyone cares about what you’ve got to say. If I can accept the first leap and snapshot what’s inside my head, surely it’s not a great leap to do the same with the outside.