Not pretty. Day 3 - My Week of Thoughts - An initiative created by @pechichemena. (Raising $ for @adollaraday)

Plain Jane Me

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I've never been the "pretty" girl in any collective group of friends, or in a class at school, or at any place of employment. Never the one people notice first. I am, and have always been, the plain one. I wear plain clothes. Flannel and t-shirts and jeans are my favorites. I have a plain face. An awkward speaking voice.

I am the "shy" one.. the "sweet" one.. the always "eccentric" and sometimes moody person who hangs around on the sidelines until a joke or a shoulder is needed. I actually think I'm pretty funny sometimes when I'm not.

A silent room after you tell a hilarious joke usually probably means that your joke wasn't really as hilarious as you thought it was. It might have even been offensive or just resulted in making you look cardboard-box-of-rocks dumb.

To be clear, I say these things not at all to make people say things like, "Oh Serena you are not bad looking." I'm just stating facts. I'm okay with how I look, I guess. I try to be at least. Maybe I'm just not.

Steemit open mic kind of constantly reminds me that I am the plain girl as well. It's how I know I'm actually a good singer. Because look at my face. It's not winning any contests by itself. And while my breasts are actually pretty spectacular all on their own, I'm not going to have my precious lovelies dangling out of my shirt and flowing out onto my guitar while I sing my songs. No boob zooms for me, thanks. That is not how I roll and flow.

Is anyone ever really in love with the way they look? Probably, yeah. I actually used to take self portraits a lot. Very often at times, even.

I even did a photography project on myspace (when myspace was a cool thing) called "The Narci Project." Every day I took a self portrait and shared it. The picture I shared above was not one of them, it was taken much later.. but it's similar to the kinds of portraits I took.

I just liked to do it for the sake of being artsy. I went to school for photography and we were required to do a self-portrait project one week and I just really enjoyed it. I enjoy trying to compose an image in some way that makes ordinary things look extraordinary.

Extra ordinary.

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Hmm. Saying something is extraordinary doesn't actually sound so much like a compliment after breaking it down into two words like that just now. Interesting how that works. It's a whole new word to me now. Extra amounts of ordinary. That is actually me. I'm extraordinary!

Anyway.. so I was doing my Narci project for about 3 or 4 months before myspace began to die and I moved over to Facebook because literally all of my friends had left facebook by then. I was the last to go. I held on for so long. It's what I do.

And then with the rise of Facebook profile pictures, "selfies" became a word. And cell phones became selfie tools. And I stopped doing it so much. The word "selfie" pretty much single-handedly destroyed my interest in self portraits forever. So it seems. Maybe I might get back into it just for the sake of not letting the word "selfie" destroy my creative process, even if only on a small scale of importance.

I don't have very many of my Narci project portraits anymore, though. It's a shame. One day I was looking through my files and deleted almost all of those pictures because I thought they were pretty stupid.

I wish I had kept them all. Some of them were really creative. Some of them were just plain. This is one of them that I kept because I like the polka dotted shirt I'm wearing in it. That was a fun shirt. Now I can't find it anymore. Where my stuff goes when its lost is a mystery. Hence the word, lost. But yeah.

^{taken with a camera and just guessing where my face was}

We should never call ourselves "ugly." We just shouldn't. Now that I'm a mom and I have a daughter who is very self-conscious (she is 12) and worries constantly about what people think of her (because she is 12) I am very careful not to ever say that I don't like my appearance.

I never say things like "I'm so fat" or "I'm too old" or "look at these wrinkles." I don't want her to feel like those things define who I am as a woman, or that they will define who she is when she becomes a woman, or that physical "beauty" defines her sense of self now in any way.

Here's a picture of the two of us when she was 6. We both got haircuts with bangs that day (a fringe, as they say in other parts of the world).. that was because I had recently had gotten 13 stitches in my forehead and was embarrassed for people to see it. I still have a scar. You can see it in my videos if you pay enough attention. But whatever. I'm okay with it now.

It's my cat, Waffle's, fault. He was a kitten and bolted out of the kitchen door and across the back yard in the darkness, and I chased after him and dove after him and fell into the sharp edge of a 4x4 fence post and it cut my forehead open. A lot. There was blood everywhere. I still have the shoes with bloodstains on them. I call them my "bad luck shoes."

I'm going to leave this here now. I wrote A LOT MORE just now but it was just rambly rambly rambly even more than this rambly now.

Have a great day, evening, night, morning. Wherever you are.

Much love,

♥- Serena

This post is the third of 7 that I will do in support of @pechichemena's new "Week of Thoughts" project. All the SBD recieved from this post will go to the @dollaraday charitable giving project, which was founded by @pennsif and was created to help raise daily funds for a wide variety of charitable projects that are close to his heart.

Please maybe consider also creating a week of daily thoughts, if for no other reason than to inspire yourself to write a thought down every day. It could be even one sentence. Just a tiny little sentence. I believe in you. You can do this. Give it a whirl. Here's a high five to you from me, even if you don't do it. Just because high-fives are cool.

^{Insert imaginary high-five between me and you, right here.)}

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