Musings on Vanity

Vanity is usually framed as a negative thing but does it has to be? I hold myself up for scrutiny, I'm vain. I often make jokes about my propensity to pose at the merest hint of a camera being held up in my general direction. It might be a slight exaggeration but it's basically true I love having my picture taken, I also love looking at myself in the mirror, being sketched, painted, listening to my own voice on a recording and seeing myself on tape.

I have always been this way. As a young child I was entranced with my body, the feeling of being in it and the feeling that I wasn't always in it. When I was a bit older I didn't think I was pretty but still looking in the mirror never lost it's appeal and not as one might imagine to pick apart my flaws. I was still entranced with my body with it's shape the way it was changing the way it looked when I moved the play of light on it. At university I sat for art students as a body model, it was awesome. I loved that they showed me their work when they were done. Seeing the different ways they saw me and comparing it to how I saw myself intrigued me. Also since everyone had a different vantage point being able to see how being observed from different angles made a difference in people's perceptions, that was good stuff. 

My first ex husband is a very good artist, in fact he was an art major until he decided he needed a more practical major to get a job. After we started dating (which was the end of the first week of classes so before I began being a body model)  he occasionally drew me. At first I was confused as to who he was drawing b/c I didn't recognize myself in his pictures. Those first pictures are what made me realize the beauty other people saw in me. By that point I knew I thought I was pretty but I figured I was biased. My fascination with my own image hasn't waned. I wish there were more pictures of me pregnant since it was so a time of so many bodily changes. I love documenting things in pictures. I have plenty of pictures of times when I don't think I looked my best, I may not post them but I have them and I think they too are beautiful. 

Vanity can be shallow but I wonder if it always is. I know in my vanity, my love affair with my own reflection in various media I have come to know me. I am more than my body but I am not me without my body.