This is a self-portrait I drew in a minute or so with my eyes closed.
I made this a couple of years ago during a group Zoom activity at work. (We were also drawing llamas, and the eyes-closed self-portrait was one of the warmups, if I remember correctly.) It turned out pretty well, so I’ve kept it.
What I like about this drawing is that it seems to have a certain coherence, and is recognizeably me. If you know me, you’d probably agree that this captures most of the salient points of my appearance and maybe even some of my personality.
Yet, if you look closer, it’s not actually connected up at all.
The hair is just kind of floating at the top, a great distance from my glasses, which are themselves floating in space. My beard, mustache, and mouth are kind of jumbled together, three squiggles that don’t line up properly. And my shirt is completely off-center. Major features are entirely missing, merely implied by the white space.
Despite how poorly everything lines up, somehow, the viewer’s eyes put it all together and the brain registers it coherently: Yeah, that’s a person — a little off-kilter, but smiling and recognizable.
I don’t think my drawing skills are distinctive, and this eyes-closed exercise was just a few scribbled lines. (Plus, I cheated a little on the “eyes closed” assignment. I drew most of this portrait with my eyes closed, but I added the eye dots afterward, with my eyes open.) The drawing was messy, and it didn’t feel like anything special. But my coworkers seemed to like it and admired it.
So I kept it, and now I’m sharing it with you.
Implied lines
For me, this is how self-presentation works in our digital age. We don’t feel particularly well put together. We create things that attempt to represent who we are, and to us, they look like a mess: They’re off-center, misaligned, full of flaws, missing crucial pieces.
And yet, when we share them, these creations look pleasing, artistic, and coherent to others. Other people’s eyes and brains see a series of Instagram posts where we are living our best lives, and they fill in the blanks. Their minds complete the portrait of a person whose life is beautiful and coherent.
They see our newsletter and blog posts, which might come out once every week or two, and fill in the blanks, seeing us as skilled writers with discipline, talent, and plenty of things to say.
They see our posts on LinkedIn and think we’re fabulously successful, moving from victory to victory, as we land new jobs, complete new projects, earn promotions, or take well-earned pauses from our careers.
But they don’t see all the gaps between those posts — the messiness, the rough drafts, the abandoned projects, the long moments of frustration and self-doubt.
Be gentle with yourself
I had a conversation with my Reiki teacher, Marion, a few weeks ago. We were eating at a little table at Maison Nico in San Francisco, while her big grey dog, Bowie, snoozed at her feet. She encouraged me to share more of my personal life online, like she does. But you have such a beautiful life, I told her. I don’t feel like my life is nearly attractive or interesting enough for me to do what you do. And my job is basically me typing on a keyboard all day: boring!
She encouraged me to think differently about it. Maybe I need to find a different style, yes. I could share about the abundance of apples in my backyard. If the tree or the yard is not beautiful, I might show a bowl full of apples instead of the tree. Or maybe a photo of just my hand, writing, instead of a selfie or a video of me typing.
Marion added that she spent years discovering her style, figuring out the camera angles that work and the subject matter that resonates with her soul and with her audience.
When I look at her Instagram, I see the results of all that work — but I don’t see the trial and error or the work that went into it. I see the one excellent photo, not the 19 shots that didn’t work out.
It’s like my self-portrait. It might look coherent, but your eyes are filling in the gaps and correcting for the errors. You don’t see the failed drawings I did the same day. You don’t see the days that I stared at the page, not knowing what to write — or the days that I wasted by reading too many news stories, shopping, or diving deep into some fleeting obsession, like how to make kaleidoscopes.
My point is this: Be gentle with yourself. Comparing yourself with what others look like online will always make you crazy because you will see all the gaps and flaws in your own life, but you won’t see those in others’ appearances. You won’t see the curation, editing, and hard work that goes into others’ self-presentation. And you won’t see the way that they feel their own online appearance falls short of, say, yours. As they say: Compare and despair.
But also be gentle with others. Unless they’re truly narcissistic, they probably see the world in a similar way, feeling that their own lives are hopelessly incoherent and messy compared to the beautiful, put-together people they see online.
Embrace the mess. And embrace your messy friends. It’s okay to be scribbly sometimes.
BTW, SF Bay Area people: Marion is offering a Reiki I certification in November. I’ll write more about my experiences with Reiki at some point. For now, I will just say that this class was a powerful and extremely useful education in energy channeling and meditative co-regulation, and Marion is a sensitive, intuitive teacher.
