Alive Enough To Be Remembered

There is something that happens when people see themselves in a photograph, something both small and cataclysmic.

A shift, a betrayal, a fracture.

I’ve noticed it again and again… a photo is taken… perhaps in laughter, perhaps in stillness, perhaps in the rare moment when someone has forgotten themselves long enough to simply be alive… and then, moments later or days later, they see it. And what was once joy evaporates. Their face, so bright in the moment, collapses into critique.

Their lips mutter words like, I look terrible, I look fat, I look old, I look wrong.

I hear it ALL THE TIME! (I say it too…)

It doesn’t matter how fleeting or timeless the moment was… once the photograph is revealed, their gaze betrays them. Suddenly, the beauty that existed is questioned. Suddenly, the memory is threatened. What was once eternal is now stained by the sickness of self-perception. And the saddest part is that I understand it. Because (again) I do it too.

Almost everyone does.

We are caught in this strange loop of disbelief… unable to see what the photographer saw, unable to accept the gift of another’s vision.

It breaks my heart most for the photographer. Because the photographer, whether amateur or professional, whether with a thousand-dollar lens or just a phone held shakily in their hands, saw something they loved. They saw a human being shimmering in light, alive in gesture, and thought, “I must hold onto this.”… That is the instinct of the photographer… to give a moment of reverence to a moment of time enough to make it still, to build a shrine for the ordinary miracle of someone existing. They press the shutter because they believe in beauty. And then the subject, the muse, takes one glance at it and rejects it. Says it is flawed. Says it is wrong. As if the photograph is not evidence of being but evidence of failure.

That is the wound… when the sacred act of preservation becomes poisoned by the profane doubt of self.

And yet, how hypocritical we are, for even the photographer is not immune. Even they, when photographed, will wince. They will critique their own jawline, the slump of their shoulders, the width of their body, the weariness in their eyes. It is a kind of universal tragedy. A recursive self-loathing dressed as humility, dressed as realism, when in truth it is nothing but the inheritance of a culture that has taught us that self-love is dangerous, that beauty must always be proven, that to accept being seen is arrogance.

We live in a world where it is safer to say, I hate how I look, than to say, I am beautiful in this. We live in a world where these things are considered normal. We apologize for our faces the way people apologize for existing. We shrink before the evidence of our own bodies as though we are intruders within them. What a cruel, absurd arrangement. What a terrible distortion of what it means to be human.

Because look… when we see someone we love, really love, we never study them with suspicion. We see them with a tenderness that softens every line, every blemish, every crease. We see their existence as an offering. When they laugh, when their eyes crinkle, when their mouth opens mid-sentence, we feel blessed to witness it. We don’t count their flaws… we count the miracle of them being alive in our presence. That is what a photograph preserves… not flawlessness, but miracle.

And yet, when the same grace is turned toward us, we flinch. We cannot accept it. We accuse the photograph of lying, or worse, of being too brutally honest. We convince ourselves that others are deluded to find us beautiful. We want the camera to erase us into perfection, but also resent it for showing us too much truth. It is a madness. It is a cage.

Somewhere, I think, this madness begins in childhood. Watch a child look at their own photo. They grin. They point. They say, “That’s me!” with awe, with delight, with the radiant certainty that being themselves is enough to be celebrated. They do not scan the picture for proof of inadequacy. They know, instinctively, that the photo is holy because it confirms that they are here. But somewhere along the way, that awe is stolen from us. Shame creeps in like a parasite. The voice of comparison, of advertising, of criticism, replaces the voice of wonder. Suddenly, the same “That’s me!” becomes “That’s not good enough.”

And this loss… the loss of our ability to accept ourselves as we appear to others… is no small thing. It is not vanity. It is not mere insecurity. It is existential. Because when we cannot bear the sight of ourselves, we cannot fully inhabit our lives. We become ghosts, lingering outside of our own image, suspicious of every reflection. We become prisoners to the mirror, enslaved by an image that was never even ours to control.

I think often of mirrors and their lies. A mirror is a strange device… it does not show you yourself, not really. It shows you an inversion, a reversed self, the you that no one else ever sees. And because you are accustomed to that inversion, the camera, which shows you as the world sees you, feels wrong. Alien. Distorted. You recoil because it does not align with the familiar illusion. But who are you to say which version is true? Who are you to claim authority over how you are seen? Perhaps the truest image of you lives not in mirrors or cameras at all, but in the eyes of those who love you.

And yet, that is the one gaze we resist most. To let ourselves be seen through another’s eyes feels unbearable. It feels dangerous. We worry about arrogance, about self-delusion. But maybe the opposite is true. Maybe it is delusional not to believe the love that is given to us. Maybe the real arrogance is thinking we know ourselves better than those who love us do.

What would it mean, then, to surrender to that vision? To believe the photograph is not an executioner but a gift? To say, “If you saw me as beautiful in that moment, then maybe I was.” To stop auditing our own faces and instead let the image be evidence of aliveness, of time, of belonging.

Because that is what photographs truly are… fragments of belonging. Each one says, You were here. You lived. You laughed. You loved. You were seen. To reject them is to reject proof of life. To accept them is to honor existence itself.

Imagine if we all stopped criticizing ourselves in photos. Imagine if we began saying “That’s me” again with childlike awe. The whole fabric of society might shift. Advertising would lose its grip. Shame would lose its power. Perhaps we would finally begin to understand that beauty was never about flawlessness. Beauty was always about presence.

We are not meant to be flawless. We are meant to be art. And art is never perfect… it is alive. A cracked painting, a scratched record, a shaky voice… all still move us because they carry the pulse of humanity. Why should a photograph of us be any different? Why should we demand to be more than human?

Perhaps the quiet revolution begins with this… the next time someone shows you a photograph of yourself, resist the reflex to critique. Instead, let it wash over you. Look at the joy in your eyes, the curve of your shoulders, the accident of your hair, and say, That’s me. I was alive. I was loved. I was enough.

Because in the end, every photograph is a defiance of oblivion. A way of saying… I will not be erased. And if we can learn to accept that… if we can learn to see ourselves as art in the eyes of others… we might finally make peace with the greatest truth of all… that being alive, as we are, is already beautiful.