One Year of My Face

Okay, because of the one-year down thing, I'm forcing myself to do this face thing. Be warned - this is a lot of my face. It's not because I love my face so much that I have to share. It's more like because one photo never shows the whole picture. There's the pictures straight on and the pictures from the side a little and the pictures from a little above, which all show something different about my cheeks. There's the ones with me smiling and the ones with me not smiling. There's the ones that look pretty good and the ones that look pretty bad. I feel a certain amount of pressure when I take self-portraits - I want to be pretty but I also want to be honest, and I want to be true to my vision of myself without appearing to be phony or vain. (Egocentric much? Yes, that's me.)


March 27, 2009 285 pounds

The first is the one I went with. I've also showed some of me smiling so you can see the hideousness that happened to me. You can see in my eyes that I'm not enjoying this, because taking a photo of yourself and posting it to Facebook is actually a practical matter (it ought to be done), but is also a matter of vanity, and I did not measure up. While you can see the lumpiness of my face in these pics when I smiled, you may also be able to see the way the lines drew my face down, aging and saddening my countenance when I did not smile. I could choose between happy-but-ugly (and looking rather pathetic) or more tolerable but sad and a big downer (and still looking pretty pathetic but also pretentious if I appeared too faux-moody.) I hated it. The last picture sorta shows how I felt about the whole process.

July 31, 2009 - 240 pounds - already looking better

December 25 - 215 pounds - getting harder to take a crappy shot now

And now, from my hike the other day, when even the bad pictures were okay. I had a hard time choosing only a few for this set.

March 20, 205 pounds