Selfie

This week’s Photo A Week Challenge is ‘Selfie’ and today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt is ‘a picture from wherever’ so here I am with a kind of amalgamation of both… It’s a selfie of me taken last Saturday, sitting in my back garden.

I used to be far too self-conscious about seeing photographs of me, but as I’ve got older it doesn’t bother me nearly so much. I’m 58 years old, turning 59 towards the end of the year, and I am what I am. I used to worry about my hair and my skin and my weight and my clothes, about looking acceptable to the world by what I perceived to be the world’s expected standards of appearance.

And now? Now I see how image obsessed social media has made us all with its fancy portrait filters rubbing out every potential skin blemish, and I worry about my three lovely young granddaughters growing up in such a surface-judgemental environment. So here I am trying to live up to what I tell them about life – always be yourself, you’re beautiful just as you are, and don’t ever let the world tell you otherwise…

And in my selfie I’m sitting in my back garden, in my own little oasis of nature, wearing a flowery dress while relaxing on a traditional-style wooden steamer chair and enjoying the sunshine while it lasted… Oh, for me it’s definitely the simple things in life that make all the difference 🙂