Let’s get something straight: you don’t actually know what you look like. I mean, not really. You’ve never seen yourself the way anyone else does. Every photo, every mirror—none of them can show you the thing people see when you walk into a room, or the way your friends light up when you laugh at their dumb jokes.
But for some reason, we all seem to believe we’re uniquely qualified to judge our own faces. Like we’re running some kind of personal Project Runway in our heads, handing out withering critiques. “Look at my nose. My weird eye. Why does my mouth do that thing when I smile?”
You can probably recite the list of things you hate about your face faster than you can recall your own phone number. You might joke about being camera shy or say, “I’ll break your camera!” when someone points a lens your way. Meanwhile, the people who love you would probably pay good money for just one more picture of you being yourself—awkward smile, squinty eyes, all of it.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: everyone thinks they’re ugly. Your boss, your mom, the guy on TV, the friend who posts suspiciously perfect selfies. There’s a universal conspiracy of self-loathing when it comes to faces. And yet, somehow, none of us see the other people we love as anything but—well, themselves. If you look back at old photos of people you’ve lost, you don’t see their “flaws.” You see moments. You see stories.
The idea that you’re supposed to look a certain way is, frankly, nonsense. You just look like you. The same you that made your friends laugh until they choked, the same you who has people who can’t wait to hug you, or text you, or just hear from you. When the people who care about you look at a photo, they don’t see your insecurities. They see someone they’d give anything to keep around.
The brutal truth is you’ll never see yourself with the kind of affection and soft-focus forgiveness other people give you. But that’s not your job. Your job is to show up in the pictures. Don’t delete them. Don’t duck out of the frame. Let yourself be seen, weird smile and all, because one day the people who love you will treasure that photo more than anything.
You’re not ugly. You just look like you. And that’s exactly what the people who love you are hoping to see.