Jun 4, 2015 3 min read

People take selfies because it’s instant gratification. If you’re not feeling so cute today, you can extend your arm and snap away until you get just the right combination of smile or pout that results in an image that more or less matches what you think – or hope – you look like to the rest of the world.

I take selfies once in awhile. When a website I write for requests a bio and photo, I create both myself. The photo on this column is a selfie, selected after a sweaty half-hour snapping away under just the right lighting conditions in my kitchen.

I took the selfie on my digital camera, not my smartphone, like most people. A phone selfie can be posted on Facebook or Twitter in seconds, but I don’t do that. In smartphone selfies, I look puffy and old (a.k.a., like Bethie in real life). My digital camera erases all that.

And am I the only one who thinks smartphones are designed to make us all feel bad about ourselves? The reflection on the screen gives me two chins more than I actually have. Some say it’s the low angle we hold the phones at, but I say Androids are doing it on purpose.

I don’t post many photos on Facebook, but the ones I do are carefully chosen, cropped and edited for wrinkles and lines. The left side of my face is better than my right, so I take my selfies with my left hand. I have a prodigious forehead (my kids call it my fivehead), so my bangs have to be arranged just so. And if I smile too broadly, my cheeks tend to gobble up my eyes, so I’ve practiced a more demure smile.

Crazy, I know. But isn’t that just my version of that inane and ubiquitous “kissy lips” pose?

I once quit Facebook for a few months, early on, because someone posted a truly horrifying photo of me and then tagged me for all to see. I was on a volunteer trip to Costa Rica, and a member of our team snapped my photo while I was standing at our lunch buffet, hunched over a big serving bowl of salad. My posture was bad enough, but I was also bald then. We were in a garage, so the lighting wasn’t helping. If you didn’t know that was me, you would have guessed “elderly man.”

I didn’t know I could block that photo. Frantic to remove that image of me from the public eye, I just bailed on the whole thing.

What I didn’t think about at the time was 1.) there’s a way to prevent tagging of bad photos, and 2.) nobody really cares what I looked like in that or any other photo.

I spend about a half-hour on Facebook every day, seeing hundreds of photos of people – many of them selfies. All my friends look pretty. All their sons and daughters look beautiful. I suspect the photos have been carefully selected with that in mind. Unlike real life, Facebook is the land of the pretty.

The photo on this page is the best of probably two dozen selfies I took that day. It’s been run through an iPhoto app that erased wrinkles. I spent extra time on my hair. I fussed over my makeup. It’s the best I could do. Is it what I look like?

Rarely.