“True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are, it requires us to be who we are.”
– Brene Brown
Everybody is interesting when they are themselves. Few people are interesting when they’re playing some kind of character for the external world to observe. My aim is to present my clients as interesting.
Interesting and beautiful are not necessarily the same thing and interesting must take precedence. The reason that it can be difficult for people to accept that sometimes is that the generalised message that we have in society is that beautiful is more important than interesting, but it’s wrong. We know this because when we stop and think about it, we know it’s wrong but we perpetuate it for some reason. I’m not really sure why we allow it, but we do. Beauty is nice, we all like to look at beautiful things, it’s very nice. It’s just nowhere near as important as interesting.
Because of this idea that is drilled into us by the media that we consume – beauty is the most important thing – somebody who comes into the studio who doesn’t consider themselves beautiful and wants to be beautified is going to struggle to appreciate the interest they have in the picture. It’s more about how you feel than how you look and if my emotional response to that picture is that I want to ask this person a question or I wonder what they’re thinking at that moment, then that holds so much more value than “Oh, that’s pretty”.
It’s easy to have something that immediately feels acceptable and nice, but it’s far more long-lasting to have something that’s got a bit of depth and character and nuance to it.
We know this and we can demonstrate this because the most famous portraits of people in the world are of people that are not considered to be particularly attractive. People will stand in line for hours in a gallery in Paris to look at a portrait of a woman who is not considered, by today’s standards, as particularly beautiful nor was she considered particularly beautiful in the time it was created. But – she’s interesting. The portrait is interesting and that’s why it has endured for over 500 years. Whereas the picture of someone who’s just good looking is…oh, ok…next, next, next….that’s your instagram feed.
There is inherent value in being a human and there is something interesting about everyone.
The way you look in a picture is what you look like to the rest of the world and that will always be different to the way you see yourself in the mirror. We all have a gap between what we think we look like and how the world sees us. The aim is to get you to accept that gap. Being able to see yourself from that external perspective has value just in itself.
