My friends did a 1 second video every day of 2022, each publishing a six-minute speed run through their life on New Year’s Day 2023. They were so fun to watch! Sign me up! And I did – sign up, that is: I recorded 1 second of video most days of 2023.
What I didn’t account for is this: I don’t think to observe things in the moment. I took videos in quiet moments, often alone. My 2023 speed video is going to be a lovely progression of garden flora and bedroom fauna (aka cat cuteness). Each month is quite soothing.
This post isn’t about that.
This post is about THIS.
I set off on the video project thinking it would be a document of what happened in my year, and I wanted a counter-document of what happened in myself. Thus, the selfies. I took one most, but not all, days.
Unlike the videos, I often did remember that a moment called for a selfie. The collage above orders them in roughly a table, with the vertical axis representing months and the horizontal one days (the blank bottom right corner would be 27-31 December, since I stopped taking photos so I could make this post now, in the last few days of the story). Larger photos were bigger days – a first snow, a loss, a trip, a lesson, a moment of art.
When I tell people I’ve been trying to take a selfie every day for a year, their first thoughts are often along the lines of well, that’s self-absorbed or how many duck faces could one person need? – and, I mean. Fair.
No shade to the many glorious duck faces of the world, but my intent was to capture the mood, I guess? To have an internal story that followed the external one in the videos?
And that is where I was magically, surprisingly, utterly wrong.
There is no story.
There are many, many, many expressions of my face and the mood of the day or the moment. There are clear signs that I was most likely to stop and think when I took a break to swim, and that my swimming season is quite long (so many pool photos I almost feel like apologizing for how repetitive I am). There are indicators of place and time, for sure.
But those stories we form about how we felt like this, but then a Thing changed and that led to a New Feeling? Not really there.
My January faces and my July faces are the same.
It was a rather eventful year, too! COVID stuff is still happening. There are two widely publicized and horrifying wars going on. I had to help a beloved dog, Riley, die. We had (and still have) a terminally ill cat. My company went through multiple rounds of layoffs, including me. I took a three-month sabbatical, learned a ton of things and traveled to several places I’ve never been (and some old favorites I hadn’t seen in ages). I made new friends, I danced, I played music, I re-covered a chair.
My face isn’t joyful every day of my sabbatical selfies. But it is happy just a day after Riley died. My selfies don’t take a sudden turn towards sadness, doubt or fear (although I felt all those things, as well as connection, care and relief) in early August after I was laid off, nor do they suddenly become serious, curious and focused in September when I started to build my little side consulting gig into a business. Nor did I weep through every selfie from October 7 onward.
I do look quite pleased on the first day of my birthday month, though.
So.
The story is different from what I expected. The story is this: I am constantly changing. How I feel is about the moment, the sunlight on my skin, the people and animals I’m with, the experience of being alive. Mood is really, really ephemeral. People look at a handful of these photos on my phone and say I look like completely different people from day to day – and, in fact, the facial recognition of my photo libraries doesn’t think I’m the same person in all of these.
The moment is the story.