You keep picturing what other people are thinking about you.
The Dunne family reunion happened every August at the same lake in Michigan, and every August Uncle Walt announced a group photo at four o’clock sharp. He owned a tripod and a camera with a ten-second timer. He handled both like ship’s equipment.
Jess had married into the family six years ago. She had been in five of these photos and disliked all five. At three-fifteen she locked herself in the cottage bathroom and got to work. She changed her shirt twice. She found the angle where her chin did what the internet said a chin should do. She practiced a smile that showed teeth but not the gap on the left. She decided the second row, half behind her tall brother-in-law, was the safest place to stand.
At four, twenty-three people lined up on the dock. Walt ran back from the camera eleven times, because he and the timer disagreed about what ten seconds was. Jess held her smile through all eleven. By the last one her face felt like it was being held up with thumbtacks.
That night the photos landed in the family group chat. Jess opened the first one and went looking for herself. It took her a second, because she was searching the wrong spot. She looked fine. She looked like a person standing on a dock.
Then the messages started. “My eyes are shut!” wrote her sister-in-law Dana. “Look at my neck,” wrote Aunt Pat. Her husband, Ben, wrote that he had been mid-sneeze and now looked like a man receiving bad news. A cousin had zoomed in on his own elbow and wanted to know what was happening to it. For twenty minutes the messages kept coming, and every one of them was about the person who sent it.
Jess scrolled up, then down, then up again. Nobody had written a word about her chin. Nobody had written a word about her.
She set the phone on the porch rail. Out on the lake the light had turned orange, and Walt’s tripod was still standing at the end of the dock with no one in front of it. She picked the phone back up and, for the first time all day, looked at what was behind everyone in the picture. It was a good lake.
What to notice
Everyone in that chat did what Jess did: they went straight to their own face. She spent forty minutes preparing for twenty-two judges, and every one of them was busy being the judge of only themselves. The attention she dreaded was real. It was just pointed the other way.
A question to think about: Think of the last time you were sure a room was watching you. What were you watching in that room?
These stories are for reflection, not a substitute for professional help.