A few years ago I wrote this post, about struggling to take a selfie for some event or other that required one to be submitted.

On that occasion I propped the camera on a pile of books and set the self timer.

I hated doing it, and hated the results. The lighting was bad (I sat myself in front of a window, perhaps subconsciously trying to conceal my face in the shadows) and I had no idea what pose to strike or what expression to pull.That was over eight years ago. In the meantime, I think I have repeated the selfie-for-publication experience only twice – both times using my laptop camera which, being pretty much geriatric in computer-age terms, produces flatteringly grainy and indistinct portraits that somehow manage to make my wrinkles disappear.

Well, this week I had to sort of repeat the experience – only ON STEROIDS (not me, the experience). Because this time the pictures are for a magazine feature, rather than just my own, sparsely-read blog or social media output.

Having made such a resounding mess of it before, I decided that this time I definitely needed help. So I “reached out” via facebook (i.e. made a totally desperate plea to my friends) to borrow a a tripod and beg someone to come and give me a hand lining up the shots and pressing the shutter button.

Luckily I know some lovely creative people who live nearby and Charlotte of The Forgotten Library kindly lent me her posh tripod (and made a special trip to my house to show me what to do when, like a numpty, I couldn’t work out how to attach my camera to it!)

And Katherine of Katherine Hill Handmade, who takes brilliant photos of her own work – see below for one of her photos of her fabulous eggcup pincushions. Unlike me, Katherine is not ashamed to publish her own selfies and she came round to mine to spend a morning “doing a David Bailey” and helping me get over myself enough to be photographed.And it has been a success – after a whole morning’s snapping and a mammoth editing session, I actually have some photographs of myself that I am not ashamed of, to send off for strangers to judge and for the public to pore over.

I can’t post the best ones here as they need to go off to the magazine publishers unshared, but the photos in this post are some of the (post-editing) outtakes.

But oh, what a painful process it has been!

Having to come up with photos of myself prompted me to re-read the old selfie blog post I mentioned earlier, to see how my feelings back then compared (or contrasted) with now. And I wish, having done so, that I could go back in time and tell myself, eight years ago, to go and read some tutorials on how to take photographs of yourself (of which there are many) and then just get on with it.

Because looking at myself eight years ago I don’t know why on earth I was embarrassed to have my photo taken. The photos may be bad, but I look nice. Embarrassed and self conscious and badly lit yes, but nice.

Katherine would make a good photographer – she encouraged me to talk, to keep moving, to not think about the camera, and just kept snapping away. The beauty of digital photography is, of course, that you don’t need to worry about wasting film. You can take hundreds of photos all on one little memory card and then just discard all the ones you don’t like. There is no need to get every shot perfect, because you can edit quite a lot of the imperfections away after the event.But the editing process has, in some ways, been the worst part of all.

There is nothing more dispiriting than seeing literally hundreds of photos of yourself as others see you, from all angles, looking, quite frankly, old.

Before everyone has a go at me for the above statement, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being old. Having lost my best friend to cancer in her thirties, I am only too well aware that not all of us get to live long enough to experience it and that those of us who do should be thankful, not depressed about it.

But, just as I felt eight years ago, in my own mind I am not as old as I look. In my mind, I am probably aged around 40, and I do not have a double chin, a crepey neck or bags under my eyes. My hair is not too young for my late-middle-aged face. There are no droopy eyelids or crows feet around my eyes and I do not look w-i-d-e in my favourite frock. In my own head, I look nice. Like I did in those photos from eight years ago.

But surely, I hear you say, I have seen myself prior to these photographs? Surely I am confronted with my own appearance every time I look in the mirror? Surely, looking – and being – older can’t have come as a shock?

Well, yes and no. My bedroom mirror is usually quite mucky and dusty and I quite like it that way. My eyesight is no longer sharp and without my spectacles I look more or less like a blurry version of the me I have always been. I shun the camera generally, having never really felt at ease in front of it, not even as a child, when my dad used to take lots of black and white photographs of me with his posh Pentax camera.

But strip away all the protective fallacies and expose the real me, time after time, in photograph after photograph, and my self-delusion is stripped away with them. And it was definitely a shock.

I came of age in an era when a woman’s appearance was everything and I have been lucky to have been considered pretty / good looking in my youth. Actually, in terms of how women are viewed, I don’t really think much has changed since back then. In some ways things are worse now, with “selfie culture”, Instagram influencers and all the rest, making a woman’s appearance into a currency that earns many their entire living.

And despite all the pleas for women to stop using filters, to go “bare faced” and be proud of who they are and how they look in middle age, ageing is still taboo for women (and much less so for men). Look at famous “beauties” and how their appearance is endlessly and cruelly picked over in newspapers and celebrity magazines; how botox and surgery and fillers and the search for an appearance of eternal youth is touted and pursued as the ultimate goal (yes Madonna, I’m thinking about you, but not only you).

So is it any wonder that to be suddenly confronted with one’s own ageing journey, with it’s accompanying decrepitude, real and imagined; to realise that one is “losing one’s looks” and passing into the invisibility of old age, when apparently you are just a burden, out of date and out of touch, physically diminished, fit only for pity and euthanasia… (I exaggerate, but not much)… well, it’s never going to be fun, is it? A bit like walking into Dorian Gray’s attic…

So how to deal with this stuff? Well, you can’t stop getting older, that’s for sure. Not unless you give up living entirely, which is the ultimate cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face gesture of futility. Once the self-delusion has gone, you can only try to stop thinking about it in such negative terms. I have been reading some of Paulina Porizkova‘s writings and interviews. As an ex-model (and a fantastically beautiful older woman) she has some interesting things to say on the subject (not all of which I agree with).

I go back to my previous post about taking an acceptable selfie. Back then, I thought I looked awful. I already thought that I looked older in real life than I did in my mind’s eye. But actually, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the filter of my own self-criticism was the reason for that. I want to go back and give myself a shake, and then a hug, and say: you’re ok – you don’t need to worry. You look fine.

And then I imagine myself in another eight years time, when I will be the age immortalised in song by The Beatles as representing old age (I’ll let you work that one out!) – or perhaps even further into the future, if I’m lucky enough to get there. And I’m sure that I will look back at the pictures taken this week and wonder why on earth I was embarrassed to be photographed.

I will look at the woman in the photos and wish that I could go back in time and give her a shake, and then a hug, and tell her – “you’re ok – you don’t need to worry. You look just fine”. ♥