Looking to The Past with Regret? Or Hope?

            To say that I’ve never taken a bad picture would be a heinous lie. After all, I’ve been younger, and, as such, thought a lot of different things were cool that weren’t actually all that cool. For example, we have something like this here:

            A nerdy, young middleschooler (as far as I can remember, anyway) with no experience with a camera, looking down at it with terrible lighting and no filters. A lot of the pictures I took when I was a lot younger are like this, with the same camera angle and more terrible, terrible lighting.

 

       

All of these pictures are up on my instagram, forever plastered onto the internet for all to see. Some people might be a lot more horrified about having some of these types of images up. I mean, look at me! The beginnings of a scruffy neck beard starting to form, that weird sort of side-smirk that I have going on, the super curly, short hair. It doesn’t remotely look like how I do now! 

And yet… some things just never change.

                     

            While I happened to get just a smidgen better looking (just a smidgen, of course), there are clear things that are present in these pictures as there are with the ones in the past. For example, the camera angle is still almost exactly the same as it was before, albeit a bit better than before. However, a few things have gotten noticeably better: The actual resolution of the picture looks a hell of a lot better than before, and the lighting has gotten better than it was.

            Now, I can already hear people asking different things: “Okay, yeah, the pictures got a little better. What’s the point? Those other pictures are still up on instagram for people to laugh at!” And to this, I say let people laugh. Let them look at the different mistakes I made when I was younger and laugh. They were some pretty big mistakes when taking pictures! However, when the laughing is all done, let’s take a look at the newer pictures. We see such a clear, stark difference between them, with my experiences growing and helping me create better pictures for people to see.

            In Kate Eichhorn’s The End of Forgetting that we read in social media, there were a few different ideas represented to us when it came to pictures on the internet. There are arguments for how people can’t really allow themselves to move on from past pictures that they’ve taken, and that it’s so much harder to create your own identity not based on your past. She argues that it’s nearly impossible for people of my generation and those of the generation of technology to accept mistakes or embarrassment, since everyone would be able to see it. And to that I say no, this is not true. I would go against her argument and say that these ideologies from the past are still alive and well in today’s society. I mean, if we weren’t able to accept embarrassment and mistakes, would we post anything up at all? That fear would make it impossible for us to want to post anything out of fear of ridicule! Instead, we push past it and post anyway. I would argue that our ability to post on social media has actually strengthened our ability to create our own identity and to accept our pasts.

            A typical thing that people do on Thursdays on social media is a thing called “Throwback Thursday” where they find different pictures from the past and post them up for people to see. They know these pictures might not look the best. Hell, a lot of them might be some of our most embarrassing moments! However, these pictures are still being put up. I would argue that they’re being put up because they’re embarrassing. When we post something about ourselves, we are allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to everyone else. Posting something that might be years old makes us incredibly vulnerable, as it allows people to see the kind of person we once were. This doesn’t however, cause them to automatically think differently about us. Instead, we can admire how far we’ve come from our past, and we can appreciate where we came from. After all, everyone had something embarrassing in their past. To not have something like that is to not be human at all. We shouldn’t shy away from that, but embrace it and understand that we’ve changed since then, and that we’ve come a long way. While traces of our past might still be visible, we can see the clear differences that separate who we were with who we are now.

            And who knows? Maybe we’ll start to learn from our pasts and start to make something new of ourselves, and start to create new versions of ourselves as a result! In fact, why don’t I start now and actually try a new angle? Maybe some new lighting, aaaaaand...

  Not bad!