Twenty

Here I am, in all my being.

My twenty-year-old being.

I don't ever publicly post up photos of myself taken with my phone camera. For one, the picture quality is shit (Sony D5323, if you really must know). And second, I'd probably look terrible too. I mean, if it wasn't shot by my actual camera I probably didn't anticipate this photo being taken. Sure, I did set the timer and took it myself but I suppose I didn't prepare myself... explicitly for it as opposed to putting a bit more effort in my outfit when I go out knowing that photos would be taken. Yeah, I know... sigh... millennials and their attention-seeking habits. Anyway, this was more of a spur of the moment, "hey, guess I'm bored, why not take a selfie?" kind of thing.

And so explains my tousled hair, and wire-rimmed Harry Potter-esque glasses in all its glory. You can tell by my eyes that I really wasn't looking into the camera. I was more concerned with how I showed up on the screen. And since we're going into the details, let's go into the parts you can't actually see--I was sitting at the dining table in my home, my phone propped up by a half-filled can of A&W root beer. Not my top choice of beverage because of its sugar content, but a refreshing treat on a particularly sweltering day.

So here I am.

Posting this photo up on a public platform. Just because.

Nah, did you really think I'd leave you hanging? Just because what? Just because I like it. That's really all there is to it whenever someone posts up a picture of themselves, ain't it?

I like it because of my smile here. No usual toothy grin, but I think it captures my current sense of contentment pretty well. And I like it because it didn't look too bad after I slapped on a black and white filter--trust me when I say the colours were impossible to save. But I like it mostly because I've grown to accept and love this human bean pictured here.

This human bean is comfortable in her own skin. She's comfortable about having to wear glasses (though she'd willingly poke transparent plastic plates into her eyes at times), about the small red bumps that would sometimes appear on her face, and about her unkempt eyebrows because she's afraid of the pain of threading. She's also comfortable about wanting to look her best as much as possible. You can't see it here, but she has some of the lip tint she dabbed on this morning still left on her lips. She enjoys a subtle pop of colour, or really anything that would make her look less like a walking corpse.

This human bean is comfortable with her own thoughts. It took her a long time though, as she was always convinced that the only reason why people stayed by her side was because they couldn't read her toxic, inner thoughts. Borrowing the line from Watsky, "And I can't really tell if I'm a good person or I'm faking really well". Yet, being aware of this dichotomy between thought and action allowed her to better manage and control the two. She's still discovering the way her brain works, but she's getting better at it for sure.

This human bean is comfortable knowing that she is only human, and that she has so much more to learn. She's comfortable dealing with her moments of insecurities, her setbacks, her failures. And less dramatically, to pick herself up from the little awkward yet painful moments she might experience in her day-to-day life.

I'm honestly very proud of how much this human bean has grown for the past twenty years, and excited for her to continue living life.




And boy have I missed writing in this manner. It's always so fun dealing with repetition and not having a word limit that prevents me from over-describing things.