The real me.

This post is part of the Writer's Workshop from Mama Kat from Mama's Losing It.  If you don't know Mama Kat (which I can't imagine is even possible), head on over to her blog and check her out.  But not in a creepy, I wanna lick your toes kind of way.  In a nice, I wanna read your cool blog kind of way.

I hate to have my photo taken.

This has not always been the case.

When I was a teenager, my friend Amy and I would dress each other up like baby hookers and do each other's makeup like baby hookers and take roll after roll after roll of pictures of each other using our trusty 110 camera.  We would then send the film off in the mail and wait anxiously for them to be developed and returned.  There wasn't much to do where I grew up.  For real.

Somewhere along the way, I lost interest in being photographed.

And some time after that, I started to loathe it.

I can't pinpoint an exact time or even time frame that this change occurred.  I just know that there are some pictures of me and RJ early on in our relationship, but none in the past few years.  And there are only a handful of pictures of me with zj, and only two known photos of me and cj.  One is below, and the other was taken by my friend Natalie last week.

The photo I use for my blog and for my profile picture on several other social sites has a book covering up half my face.  While I did it to be funny, I also did it so as not to have to put my picture out there, repeatedly, for the world to see.  I'm not sure why, exactly.  I'm not hideously deformed, I have all my teeth, and a semi-regular waxing keeps the mustache under control.  But still, I avoid having my photo taken.

When I read the writing prompts at Mama Kat's for the week, my mind immediately dismissed number four.  Because that prompt said "share a photo that represents how you see yourself."  For some reason, the words "share" "photo" and "yourself," when used in the same sentence, creates a vortex in my field of vision.

But I kept coming back to it.

So I decided to do it.

RJ snapped this pic of me a few months ago, and for once I didn't grab the camera and delete it.

Because this is how I really see myself.