Just Imagine Everyone Naked
These monthly self-portraits often make me feel like I’m standing on a stage naked. The audience is small and eclectic, with people I’ve collected throughout different chapters of my life. There are past teachers who knew me as a shy student, and past students who knew me as their quirky choir teacher. There are vacation friends that I lost just as quickly as I made them. There are middle school best friends and their moms. There are former heartbreaks and their moms. And of course, my own mom right in the front row. (Hi, momma – I love you.)
Self-portraiture feels very exposing. I am the subject, the set designer, the photographer, and the editor; every decision is made by me. And on top of that, I – for some reason – find it compulsively necessary to pour my heart out in the captions.
I started this self-assigned project as a way to force myself out of a four-year-long creative burnout, but it’s turned out to be so much more than that. Yes, I am feeling excited about creating for the first time in years. (Woohoo!) But it’s also helped me get more in tune with myself – who I am now, in *this* moment.
It’s likely that the Julia you’re meeting in these captions is different from the one that you knew. That’s the terrifying part for me. Most of my life, it’s felt more comfortable to try to live up to the ideas that people have about me. Being seen for who I am is one of my deepest desires, but also one of my greatest fears. So as scary as it is, facing that fear is my “why.”
I’ve always been a little bit baffled by social media and the “show” that we all put on for each other. Life is hard for everyone – it’s literally the one thing we’re guaranteed to have in common. Wouldn’t social media be a much better place if we were all a little bit more ourselves? A little less concerned with what your neighbor from ten years ago might think. A little bit more free to be who we are now. So if I’m going to “put on a show,” I want it to be a vulnerable, real, and raw one.
So that’s what I’m trying to do. And yes, it’s drafty up here. But you know what they tell you when you have stage fright in show biz?
“Just imagine everyone in the audience naked.”
