scenes from my father

This, as faithfully as I can transcribe it, is what just happened to me.

[I am visiting my parents. We are discussing railways]

Dad: But once it's up and running, people will start moving to Swindon because it's an easier commute to London.
Me: Nobody's going to move to Swindon, Dad.
Dad: You never know. It might undergo a revolution of sorts. If you think back to the mid-nineties when the White Stripes brought stripped-back garage rock into stadia...

[I completely lose it and spend the next five straight minutes laughing my head off]

Mum: There you go, she laughed more than I did!
Dad: I read that phrase in an article about two months ago and I thought it was wonderful. I thought, "I must remember that phrase and say it in front of Jen." I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget.
Me: [continues giggling helplessly]
Dad: I've been trying to work out how to drop it into conversation for the last two hours.
Mum: He's been quite excited about it. He practised on me.
Dad: I just went out to the kitchen to look up the phrase so I'd have it right. I've been wanting to say that in front of you for two months.

[He disappears out to the kitchen and returns with his phone, which has a note on it reading "Mid nineties White Stripes brought stripped back garage rock into stadia"]

Dad: See?
Me: Oh my God, you wrote it on your phone.
Dad: I didn't want to forget it. Such a wonderful phrase.
Me: You compared the White Stripes to Swindon.
Dad: [nods, very pleased with himself]
Me: Do you know who the White Stripes are?
Dad: No! Not a clue! I just thought it was a wonderful phrase.
Mum: Oh, come on. You know about Jack Stripe.
Me: Jack Stripe?
Mum: ...that was the wrong one, wasn't it.

[I collapse into giggles for another five minutes while Mum does an impression of Meg White on the drums.]

Dad: I'm so pleased about this.
Mum: You've made him very happy.

help, or a difficult post

Every year since I was sixteen, I've made ten New Year's Resolutions. At the beginning of the year I write them down, and at the end of the year I go back and see how well I did. For over ten years I posted them in my OpenDiary - last year's resolutions with short commentary on how many I kept and what I did, and a fresh ten for the coming year. Now that OpenDiary has gone I put them all in a Word document, and it's a tradition so deeply ingrained in me that I forget it's actually a pretty weird thing to do. 

For 2015, resolution number seven was "I will ask for help when I need it."

I thought this was a great resolution, and actually quite insightful in terms of things that would make a real difference to my life. I'm terrified of asking for help. I'm terrified that I'm being an imposition, or being annoying. If I can just learn to ask for help, I thought, I'll be less anxious, more secure, life will run that bit more smoothly, I can get things sorted as soon as I start to see a problem rather than letting it run itself up into a catastrophe. This is a Good Resolution. 

It wasn't until Tuesday, when I found myself sobbing hysterically in my therapist's office for nearly an hour after the session was over that I realised there was a deeper layer to it. A conversation about my problems at work, my being completely taken aback by how upset I was about work, and the realisation that the session was nearly over and I was now going to have to walk my blotchy and red-faced self right into work were all feeding into each other and I just couldn't stop crying. My therapist, who had never seen me do this before, was rather concerned. I was struggling to speak, but between us we managed to establish that I did not feel up to going to work, but also had a meeting to take and didn't feel like I could call in sick. He suggested that obviously there was someone else who could take the meeting, it was no big deal at all, did I really think I'd be able to work in the state I was in? My brain acknowledged that this was not a question, this was therapist-speak for Holy shit, dude, GO HOME, and helpfully switched its narrative from you can't seriously be thinking about calling in sick because you're crying to now you have to call your manager and that's terrifying. 

It sounds stupid to write down. The same brain that conjured up images of every single person in my office sitting around talking about how rubbish I was for calling in sick is now berating me for being so stupid as to be scared of that. But that's what happened, that's what I thought, and my upset got worse and worse until I was choking on my own tears. I knew what I needed; I needed him to make the phone call. You can't ask him that, said my brain, shocked. He's here to help you learn to deal with your own life by yourself. He's not going to enable your stupid behaviour by making the phone call for you. He thinks you should damn well be able to make it yourself. If he offers, fine, but you can't ask him for something so unreasonable. 

He did, eventually, offer, and it was only when I heard him leave a voicemail that included the words "my professional opinion" that any part of me registered that this man was a mental health professional watching a patient have some kind of breakdown and of course he could make a phone call to my employer. It fought with the part still insisting that I was overreacting and/or deliberately and manipulatively trying to get out of work and not take responsibility for it. I went into work the next day, which was a very bad move, and the day after that I got an emergency doctor's appointment, a sick note, and some fancy new drugs. 

This is not depression as I know it. Depression as I've experienced it in the past is a complete lack of motivation, days on end in bed, awake on the internet all night and asleep for most of the day, hoping to be able to stay asleep until the week, the month, the year is over. Depression is not speaking to people, depression is not being able to feed myself, depression is taking three or four days to force myself to leave the house. That's not what's happening now. Up until this week I was diligently going to work every day. I'm going out with friends, on courses, to dinners. I've almost completed my first self-made skirt. Yesterday I bought general housing supplies, ordered some chocolates for my mother, and went to a friend's party. That would have felt like a goddamn miracle to any previous incarnation of Depressed Jen. But my brain is being nasty to me, keeping me worried and scared and guilty and upset. I feel bad that I haven't cleaned the bathroom. I feel bad that I don't go home as often as my family would like. I feel bad that I left the party early last night even though the host told me she wanted me to stay. Everything makes me feel like a bad person, or a useless person. 

I ended my worst period of depression by breaking up a relationship. That relationship took away the things that interested and excited me piece by piece, while keeping both eyes fixed on me to make sure I didn't find anything else to fill my mind. That relationship made time stretch out so far it exhausted me, but berated me for being so exhausted by doing nothing. That relationship told me I wasn't good enough, would never be good enough, that I was a pain nobody else would put up with. To this day, ending it has been the best thing I've ever done. 

Now my relationship with my partner is healthy, encouraging and supportive, and he wants me to get better, which is so unfamiliar to me that it sometimes still confuses the fuck out of me after nearly a year together. But I see shades of that former boyfriend in the relationship I have with my job, and that's the one that needs to end. I've been aware of this for a little while, though not with quite so much urgency as this week, and I've mentioned it to people before. They say, "That's a great idea. Get a new job if you're not happy! It'll do you good to change things up a bit." 

The thing is, I don't know how. Apart from Saturday work during my A levels, I've never worked for another company. I've been here seven years. I came in at the suggestion of a friend, doing admin grunt work, and through promotion and pay rises and moving to a different city, I'm up to twice my original salary (which still isn't a lot, mind you). I don't know how you get a job at this level or higher. Every job I've applied for has been on application form, so I've never needed a CV. I've never done an interview that wasn't civil service competency-based. I've been working my way into a company, not a profession, so I don't know what I want to do or what sort of thing I could reasonably expect to get. I don't know how the real world of job-hunting works. I need help, but I don't want to ask for it, for several reasons:

1. I don't really know what I'm asking for

2. I don't know what or how much is OK to ask for

3. Part of me is convinced that at age 30, this is not the kind of thing I should need help with

This last one is a real sticking point for me. 30-year-olds should know how to get jobs. The kind of 30-year-old who needs help getting a job is a really pathetic 30-year-old. 

I'm not at my best right now. I'm sick, I'm exhausted, I'm upset, I'm taking a brand new anti-depressant, and I'm terrified of going back to work (also, terrified of getting fired and having no money and not being able to live in this city anymore). It's not unreasonable to think I would need help. And yet I judge myself, because asking for help is just an excuse to be lazy, or sure you can ask for help but you really shouldn't need this kind of help, or what the hell are people going to think of you asking for stupid things like that, or this is something you should be strong enough to do yourself. I give myself lists of things I've been able to do by myself as proof that my need for help isn't actually real. 

I probably do need really stupid help. I probably need someone to sit and go through job websites with me. I need from-scratch CV help. I need people to tell me what I'm good at. Since I'm not only trying to do a thing I'm unfamiliar with but trying to do it when I'm not well, I probably need a lot more than that. I need people to understand I'm having a shitty time. I need hugs and stupid conversations and reassurance that the world won't end if I miss a few parties. I need to be occupied but not overwhelmed. I need to put my mental health first for a while, and I need to acknowledge what a bastard hard thing that is to do. 

This was long, and sad, and tough to write. I judge myself for how depressing my blog is sometimes, and how it's not the fun storytime I started off with, but this is where I am right now. Stuff about sunshine and puffins, I hope, coming soon. 

"Jenny"

This morning I got to work and ran straight to the loos to change out of the Tights That Like To Roll Down To Mid-Thigh (which keep managing to avoid purges, probably because they don’t have any holes in). When I came out of the cubicle, one of my co-workers was standing at the sink. She did what she always does – looked up briefly, registered that it was me, narrowed her eyes slightly, then pretended she hadn’t seen me at all and stalked out. She’s been doing this for years now, ever since this happened:

Three years ago

[I am walking from the photocopier back to my desk. I vaguely hear someone say ‘Jenny’ and assume they must be on the phone. As I sit down, co-worker approaches]
Co-worker: Jenny! I was calling you!
Me: Huh?
Co-worker: I was calling! Jenny!
Me: Oh, God, I’m sorry. I don’t answer to Jenny, I didn’t realise you were talking to me. What can I do for you?
Co-worker: [eyes narrow, voice turns to ice] Oh.

She asked me her question, I sent her the thing she was looking for, and we’ve had no interaction since. Beyond the very brief glares, she ignores me absolutely. In the early days I tried smiling at her, which she would respond to with a slightly longer glare, a small toss of the head and an offended sweep straight past me. I can find no other explanation for this other than that she was mortally insulted by my refusing to answer to ‘Jenny’.

I am not a Jenny. I’m just not. I’m no more a Jenny than I am a Susanne or a Patricia. Some Jennifers are Jenny and that’s great, but I’m not one of them. It sounds like a completely different name to me; like someone is trying to get my attention by yelling, “Hey! Desdemona!” It just isn’t my name. But because it’s a commonly accepted nickname, people use it. They know other Jennifers who go by Jenny, they personally prefer Jenny as a name, they thought they heard someone else call me that once, so they assume it's fine to call me that. It is NOT fine to call me that.

I started seriously objecting to Jenny when I was thirteen years old. It suddenly sounded weird and wrong and a bit like the addresser was mocking me. I didn’t take it up with the teachers, but all my friends were instructed, in the strongest possible terms, not to call me that anymore. Mostly it worked, eventually. Some of the schoolfriends I've stayed in touch with still do it occasionally.

Friend: You’re going to have to let us off calling you Jenny! We’ve known you too long, we can’t change now!
Me: We’ve known each other since we were eleven. I was alright with Jenny for two years and have been objecting to it for the seventeen years since. I think you’ve probably had enough time to get used to it.
Friend: Alright, alright. Jeez.

This is the worst thing. Worse than when the director of my dance school pulled me up on stage without warning and announced to several hundred people that I was the shyest person he’d ever taught (Why would anyone think this was a good idea? WHY would you do that, Scott? WHY?), and I didn’t realise he was calling me up for about three minutes because he was calling for “Jenny” and I had to spend the next three months retraining everyone not to call me that. Anyway. Worse than that. The worst thing is when people get annoyed or offended at being asked not to call me by a nickname I hate, or mock me for overreacting.

Acquaintance at party: Hi, Jenny!
Me: [having already drunk an entire bottle of wine] Argh, please don’t call me that. It’s Jen.
Acquaintance: Awww, but why? Jenny is lovely!
Me: Sure, but I don’t feel like it’s my name and I don’t like being called that.
Acquaintance: Awwwww.
Me: Please just call me Jen.
Acquaintance: [edging away from me and looking annoyed] OK.

Of course, the more this happens, the more it gets on my nerves. The more people imply I shouldn’t get upset about what they choose to call me, the more likely I am to go on a five-minute rant when I correct them. The more people I upset by correcting them on my name, the more likely I am to write long rambling blog posts about how My Name Is Not Jenny and Never Will Be, Stop Calling Me That and start plotting ways to surreptitiously circulate said angry blog post to the widest possible audience.

There is a special place in my heart for people who apologise and correct themselves when I ask them not to call me Jenny, people who correct others who call me Jenny, and people who say “I don’t know why anyone would call you that, you’re clearly not a Jenny.”

Boyfriend Back In Pre-Boyfriend Days: The funniest thing was, you didn’t even realise he was calling you for ages because he called you Jenny!
Me: I really, really hate being called Jenny.
Pre-Boyfriend Boyfriend: I was wondering for a minute whether to start calling you Jenny as a really annoying joke.
Me: I warn you, I have absolutely no sense of humour about this whatsoever.
Boyfriend Who Wasn’t My Boyfriend Yet: I can see that. I already decided it was a stupid idea. I don't think I even could call you Jenny, that just isn't who you are. You're Jen.
Me: [phew, and also yay]

A special place in Hell for people who correct me on my own name, and the most special place for this particular guy:

Nice Co-Worker: [introducing new employee round the office] And this is Jennifer.
New Guy: [to my co-worker] Jenny. [to me] Hi, Jenny.
Me: Jennifer. Hi.
New Guy: Nice to meet you, Jenny.

Message to that guy: I judged your entire worth as a human being based on this fifteen-second introduction, and I was right to do it.

fringe

I would like the record to reflect the following:

This morning I cut my own fringe, and the result was not disastrous. 

The reason for my cutting my own fringe was a gradually but noticeably mounting hate for my hair combined with lack of resources or motivation to go and get it professionally cut. Obviously poor reasoning and decision-making, and yet somehow, disaster did not befall me.

I had an engagement tonight that I couldn't get out of with an "I've fucked up my hair" excuse, which normally would guarantee that I would a) fuck up my hair and b) be in a ton of photos with fucked-up hair, but neither of these things happened. 

I have never attempted to cut my own fringe before in my life, and I'm not sure I've ever managed to get something right the first time before, and yet my fringe looks like a fringe that might reasonably be expected to sit on the forehead of a normal person. 

When I went out tonight, I got multiple compliments on my excellent new fringe before I informed anyone I'd cut it myself. 

Practical tests have since revealed that, despite what my brain immediately thought, the sudden discovery of a fringe-cutting talent has not made me any better at sewing in zips. I'm not sure why that is. 

things my teenage self somehow got away with at school

[I didn't realise there was quite as much as this when I started, and it makes me look like kind of an awful person. I would like to point out that I was quiet and smart and did fairly well at things and didn't start trouble, and also that I was undergoing some serious emotional upheaval, and also that there are just some things about me that are awful. Sorry]

Claiming my little brother had mistaken my history project for scrap paper and scribbled all over it, getting lots of sympathy and an excuse to miss the deadline, then never bothering to actually do the project at all

Spending about 20% of classes hurriedly doing the homework for my next class

Skipping out on mandatory school lunches every day for a year by hiding really ineffectually in a classroom, and only getting caught once

Being breathtakingly rude to my RE teacher (who, to be fair, was a bit creepy and seemed to like it)

Going to classes for an optional extra GCSE for a year, not even pretending to be working on a project, then going up to the teacher two weeks before the deadline and telling her I was dropping out because it was all too much for me

Bringing obviously inappropriate reading material into school all the time

Answering the phone and pretending to be my mother when my physics teacher called to complain about my lack of interest in homework. He didn't twig and spent the next few weeks smirking smugly at me, possibly imagining the dressing down I must have received

Wearing extremely non-regulation bright purple tights

Telling my tutor I had a nonspecific appointment (that I would definitely provide a note for at some stage, honest) in order to go shopping with my cousin all afternoon

Convincing an absent-minded teacher that he must have lost my homework

Keeping a copy of a "please excuse Jennifer from PE" note in my schoolbag, which I would periodically trace onto a fresh piece of paper and hand in when I didn't feel like doing PE that day

Once I got to sixth form and didn't have to wear uniform anymore, wearing a T-shirt with quite prominent swear words

Accidentally wearing said T-shirt on the first day of Prospective Students week when we were all supposed to wear suits and somehow not getting spoken to by anyone about it

Being accused of doing a thing I definitely did by a teacher who presented me with hard evidence that I'd done it, but by refusing to acknowledge what she was saying and just repeating "I wouldn't do that" over and over, getting her to walk away saying "well, I should hope not" and never speak of the incident again. I still can't believe that one worked.

the critical voice, part three

This morning I sat down opposite my therapist and said, “How do I stop trying to fix things?”
“What things are you trying to fix?” he asked, in his quiet Irish therapist voice.
“ALL the things,” I said. “Literally everything that crosses my mind; personal, local, global, minor, major, implausible, imaginary. Anything that’s a problem, I want to fix immediately, and my brain gets very upset with me if I can’t.”

He wanted examples. Therapists like examples.

I told him I was upset with the election result and worried about what might happen under a majority Conservative government. I was worried about the NHS, about my friends on disability benefits, and especially about the Human Rights Act. My brain responded to these entirely rational concerns with how can we fix this? I told it that I was in no position to personally fix it. I could not convince the Conservative party that they held horrible, damaging views, nor change the views of an increasingly right-wing nation, nor completely overhaul the political system to fairer and more compassionate ends. I could, of course, sign petitions and attend protests and, if I wanted to screw up my mental health entirely, return to political blogging. But this wasn’t what my brain wanted. My brain wanted me to fix it, personally. If not entirely by myself, then at least as the Leader of People Fixing Things. And it wanted results immediately, before the Tories actually managed to do any damage.

I told my brain that, see, this was exactly what I’d been telling it. It had proved that its expectations of me were way, way too high and completely unrealistic. Personally fixing the politics of an entire country? That’s ridiculous, brain. Surely you can see that. My brain sighed and said that’s a lame excuse and you know it. Everyone is sitting around like you, saying they can’t do anything, and that’s why it never gets done. Overhauling a country probably isn’t that hard if you know the right things to say. I asked my brain if it remembered what attempting to get involved in activism did to the state of my mental health last time. My brain said I can’t imagine why you’d think your personal mental health is so much more important than the fate of an entire country.

My therapist handed me a sheet entitled “Unhelpful Thinking Patterns” that he thought I might recognise some of. My brain scanned it and immediately scolded me for being so rubbish as to have all of them. I suggested that perhaps this might be its own fault, and it pointed at the sheet and said see that bit about shifting blame for things that are your fault?

I explained that for about six months now I’d been identifying problems in my life and trying to come up with ways to fix them. I’d come up with genuine problems, identify good and sensible ways to start turning things around, and then my brain would be pleased and start imagining wildly unrealistic consequences to my tiny starter actions.

PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Unhappy with weight gain
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Feel sad and gross all the time
SOLUTION: Start small by replacing chocolate with fruit at lunchtime
EXPECTED RESULT: Somehow lose half a stone in a week; happiness to follow immediately thereafter

PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Job dissatisfaction
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Boredom, more unoccupied time to exacerbate anxiety problems
SOLUTION: Begin thinking about different career fields
EXPECTED RESULT: Get ideal job immediately by stumbling over it in the street or some such, all problems suddenly fixed

If the expected unrealistic consequence was not instantly achieved, my brain got upset and discouraged and gave me unpleasant thoughts. It got to the point where this happened:

PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Trying to fix everything
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Frustration, exhaustion, reduced ability to actually do anything
SOLUTION: Stop trying to fix things
EXPECTED RESULT: Attempting to fix things turns out to be root cause of all problems; everything stops being difficult within the next three days

When I told him the last one my therapist did that very, very slightly surprised face that therapists who think they know what’s coming make when they hear something they really weren’t expecting. I’ve seen him do it once before, when we did an instant visualisation exercise:

Therapist: What did you see when I said ‘Roses’?
Me: I saw an illustrated rose garden in the style of an Alice in Wonderland book I used to have, except instead of actual roses it was my friend Rose, hundreds of her, on stems.
Therapist: ...you have a busy mind.

He might not have heard, “Hey, I could stop trying to fix things! That’ll fix things!” before, but he assured me that the urge to fix things was common, as was having a critical voice with completely unrealistic expectations. Be kind to yourself, he said. The primitive part of your brain sends up a fear signal, then your conscious mind starts working overtime to make it stop. It’s completely normal human behaviour. But we can work on it.

Good, I thought.

PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Completely unrealistic expectations
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Small achievements overlooked, progress stalled
SOLUTION: Place some distance in front of the thought that throws up the problem, say thank you and tell it you’ll get back to it later, this is not the time to be crafting solutions
EXPECTED RESULT: Perfectly calm and ordered brain within the hour

ARGH.

fifty-two

On Saturday, I took the fifty-second and final image in a year-long project I've been trying to complete for almost as long as I've been into photography as a hobby. And by "almost as long", I mean I took the first photo for my first attempt two weeks after I took the shot that got me into photography. I've failed at it five times in seven years, usually at either week three or week ten. But in May last year, I made an agreement with myself that I was going to try again, and I was going to get the damned thing done this time. And I did. 

Now that it's done, I have complicated feelings about it, in no small part because it's a self-portrait project and since I first attempted it in 2008, self-portraits have morphed into "selfies" and are an easy shorthand for vapidity and self-absorption. I have several thoughts on this, but we'll get to that another time. It's not made me feel ashamed of doing this, though it has made me extremely reticent about sharing or celebrating it. I've also finished this project at a time when my self-esteem is somewhat wonky, and my sense of achievement has been overshadowed somewhat by a little voice saying one photo a week? Really? How is that anything to be proud of? Anyone could take one photo a week. You didn't even put any effort into half those shots. No wonder you don't want to share it. 

I'm writing this post in part to say, shut up, voice. It's not about how difficult it is to take a photo, it's about keeping something up for a whole year. It's about completing something I failed at multiple times before this one. It's about getting back into something I used to love after taking no photos for a year and a half. It's also about learning things, and here, for you the lovely reader, are some of the things I've learnt (for reference purposes, here is my completed album. I was going to post individual photos and talk about them, but then I'd have a big unwieldy post full of pictures of my face, and I don't want that. So have a look if you like, or make up photos in your own mind). 

Firstly, the voice is right about one thing; I didn't put any effort into quite a few of those shots. "Crap, it's Sunday night and I don't have a picture yet" was the motivator behind at least a quarter of them. In practice, though, "no effort" doesn't mean "worthless". Out of the dozen last-minute Sunday night shots that I remember being last-minute Sunday night shots, I dislike three of them, and two of them I dislike because I think they could have been good (one was taken in shitty lighting and the other showcases my shitty Photoshopping). Even the one I just thought was shitty got a compliment from a friend who said he liked it. My least favourite shots are the ones I took for other reasons and wasn't planning to use for the project. #27 (the T-shirt) and #49 (the dress which I MADE) are photos I already had on my camera and used instead of taking a last-minute Sunday night shot, and I dislike them both. Lesson: take the last-minute no-effort shot anyway. 

Shot #6 (of my hair) should have been consigned to the "repurposed photos I dislike" pile, but it's actually one of my favourites. I cropped the original photo, of me dressed up as a really half-assed ladybird for a club night, down to about one-sixth of its size and edited the crap out of it. Lesson: editing is a powerful thing.

I took self-portraits in Nice, Florence and Brussels. I took them on multiple different forms of public transport. I took them at work, at dance events, in public bathrooms, down random streets in the City, in a tree in Cheltenham, by a castle in Southend. More than half of them, however, I took in my bedroom. I felt a bit bad about this at the time, but being able to do a bunch of different things with one (quite restrictive) environment is actually a really useful skill. I do, however, still wish I got better lighting in here. Lesson: work with what you have, but shitty lighting is not your friend.

Compositionally, my favourite images are #5 (on the sofa) and #22 (with the bruised knuckles), neither of which I liked that much at the time because I thought my face and/or hair looked bad. Lesson: staring at your own face to edit an image does weird things to your perception and it doesn't hurt to put them away for a while and come back later.

Three of the photos are accidents. #11 (the shadow), #24 (under the duvet) and #44 (the one taken upwards from waist height) were not the photos I was trying to take at the time, and I have absolutely no idea what I did to make #24 come out like that, but I really like all of them. Lesson: embrace mistakes.

When I look back at the whole set, my favourites - not necessarily from a photographic point of view, but the ones I most like to look at - are the ones that take me back to a specific memory or feeling from the last year. Moving house and having a room full of junk, various people painting flowers on my face or bruises on my knuckles, that time I spent New Year's Day on the beach in the sunshine in the south of France and everyone hated me... these are the things I'm most pleased to have photographic memories of. Lesson: get the camera out when interesting stuff happens.

Other things I learned, in no particular order:

I need an off-camera flash and a tripod.

Most photoshoots (which is a pretty grandiose word for what I was doing most of the time) are salvageable.

The smallest thing can serve as a good focal point.

Jumping shots are HAAAARD.

If you post a picture of your legs in stockings on Flickr, it will get several hundred views within the first twelve hours.

A blank background wall is a godsend.

When in doubt: hands and feet. 

I don't know how much I love any of these fifty-two photos from an artistic standpoint, but the project as a whole has done exactly what I wanted it to do; got me taking photos again, reminded me of why I love photography, and made me better at it. Self-portraits are difficult to separate from self-image and judge on merit alone, but my normal photography has got noticeably better, I think, since I've been doing the project. I've got used to having a camera in my hand, light makes more instinctive sense to me now, and I've stopped editing blue/orange washes on everything. Clear progress, and a worthwhile outcome. 

I don't want to get out of the habit of taking pictures now that the project's done. For the next month, I'm taking a photo a day; not of me, and not for sharing. Just a month's worth of "here's what happened in May" for my own amusement. After that I'd like to start another project. I'm considering a series of portraits, or going back to the photography technique documentation thing that I did when I first started, or something based around lighting and the off-camera flash that I am totally going to buy as soon as I have some spare cash. That's likely, right? Spare cash?