As I transition the layout of my website over the next few weeks, old pages resurface and I’ve elected to give some of them homage with a renewed posting. The following is one such, posted a few years ago, in honour of Women’s History Month and, of course, myself.

All my life, I’ve been taunted by images of beauty that I never fit. Never. As in, still don’t. I find the rise of the #selfie to be a beautiful opportunity for reclamation of the multi-faceted definition of beauty by refocusing our perceptions of physical beauty to have a wider scope. It’s not about narcissism or approval of others: it’s about saying, “I may not be what you see on magazines or television, but I’m beautiful in my own right because I am a true, unique person.” It’s a return to the standard of realism, to celebrate being human. And powerful too, because it was social media, an engine driven by people, that gave rise to the selfie. The selfie is a declaration of “I am worth being viewed and let me remind you why and it has nothing to do with me looking anything like covergirls/men because I don’t, but I’m still capable of being just as mystifying in my own way.” It’s a rejection of the norms we’ve quietly digested in place of self-love all these years, a renewal of self-actualizing our place in the world of art as portraits of real, beautiful, individual people.

-March 1, 2014