This is my face...deal with it..

I got to do a really fun set of prompts for my most recent journal page: black & white, self-portrait  and favorite quote or saying.  My love of faces is well documented, so I was excited to get to do another one.  A lot of my recent posts have been me being pretty introspective, so a self-portrait prompt seemed to fit right in with my narcissism!  

I tried to find a good picture, but then remembered I am the most non-photogenic person in the entire world...so I changed the plan and tried to find a decent picture instead...the goal was much more realistic at that point...  Here's the one I ended up picking:

My blurry picture...pay no attention to the mess in the background...it's an illusion...

If you ignore the blurriness of it, this is probably the best picture I've taken in the past 5 or 10 years...seriously...  Most.Non-photogenic.Person.Ever.  It's not a joke people.  Aside from being a decent picture, the other/main reason I picked this one is because it shows the highlights and shading really distinctly.  Thank you, blurry cell phone picture!  You've made my task infinitely more easy!

After all the blabbing to get to this point, here's the page:

My self-portrait...not perfect, but good (enough)

Not too shabby...  Not perfect (I'm looking at you forehead that I made too low!  And you, nose that should be bigger!), but pretty good.  Now that I've taken the picture (thus completing my contractual obligations to the prompts), I'm totally going to colorize this page (with my watercolors, I do believe).  I think that will help to make the page look a little more like me...or at least that's my hope...

As I was in the middle of drawing my face, I realized how little attention I actually pay to my own face.  I mean, I see it every day...I look in the mirror, you know, to make sure I don't have a booger hanging around or something stuck in my teeth and the like, but I don't think I've ever really made a close examination of it before.  I think it's an odd thing to live with yourself all your life and not really know your own details.

I've come to understand that I don't have much knowledge of myself.  I don't really have an awareness of my own opinions on things, or if I do, I don't generally make them known.  I push them to the back-burner.  I suppose it's never been important to me before.  Maybe I'm having an early mid-life crisis, but I have the sudden compelling desire to figure out what it is that I want, who it is that I am (if I was wealthy, or not tied down, or more adventurous, this would be the point where I backpack across Europe...), not the person that I show other people...  I'm well acquainted with that version of me.  I'm longing to get to know the one on the inside...the one I'd be if I wasn't so worried about the thoughts and opinions of others, because let's face it, the one I pretend to be is mostly made up of things I think other people want me to be.  I want to start paying attention to my thoughts and feelings a little better and then let that girl out...I don't want to say the 'real' me, because in the end both versions are technically real...the way a character in a book or play or a movie is real...but I want to quit playing the part.  I want to see who I am when the curtain comes down and there's no audience judging my performance.

Isn't it funny how the mind connects things?  One little blurry picture at the right time spurs a huge idea.  And one huge idea has the potential to slowly bring about change and to set something free that's been locked away for far too long.  

To be honest, I'm exhausted...it's not an easy job to hold up a mask all the time.  And it's even harder to let yourself take off the mask and examine what's behind it...and it's scary too.  Truth is scary.  Change is scary.  If, as John Wayne said, courage is being afraid and saddling up anyway, then I'm feeling pretty courageous right now.  For the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time ever, I'm feeling powerful.