How to Take a Selfie By Laura J. Oliver

Last travel story, I swear.

On my second-to-the-last day of a recent trip to the UK, I decide to go into London from my Airbnb farm-stay. The easiest way to get to the city is to walk up the road to the tiny, picturesque train station at Worplesdon. 

I take a photo of myself outside the station entrance to document my journey, but it is horrendous. I crop myself out of it and, in so doing, lose half the station sign, so now it looks like I’m boarding the train at Worple. 

Only five other passengers mill about the platform this morning, so I take a couple more selfies. Worse than bad—smiling, not smiling– shades, no shades. Defeated, I plop down on the bench with a half glance at a very beautiful girl already seated. 

In her early twenties, she flashes a bright smile back that is just so pretty I say a little prayer of gratitude that I live such a privileged life I get to appreciate beauty everywhere I look; in the leafy, verdant path I walked to the train this morning, in the charming thoughtfulness of a bookcase full of worn novels in the Harry Potterish-station lobby, and in friendly dark eyes and charismatic energy of the young woman next to me.  

I feel a kind of reaching out, but I don’t engage in conversation as our train is due any minute. After a few seconds, however, I feel a touch on my arm. In halting English, and a lovely accent I can’t place, she says, “Excuse me, but you take selfie wrong. I advice you?” And she nods encouragingly, with an expression that says, “Please let me share with you this thing that I know.”

I laugh and say, “Yes, of course!” 

“You do this,” she mimics, holding her phone straight out in front of her with Frankenstein-Zombie arms. Now I can’t stop laughing. She’s nailed it. 

“You should do this,” she says. And using the best of her English and a lot of hand gestures, she instructs me to think of my face as a triangle or pyramid, and to never take a photo straight on. 

“You must take from either side,” she says. “And from high.” She lifts her phone just above eye level, leans to the right, and smiles cheerfully at it. Like it loves her, like it is her best friend, or a date with whom she is flirting. 

I have heard this advice before but can’t abide the posturing, the artifice, so I haven’t tried it. There is something about admitting you want a flattering shot that is embarrassing. It’s one thing to “snap” a selfie; it’s another thing entirely to pose for one. 

Besides, my phone is not in love with me. We are not even dating. 

“We are selfie generation,” she says. “So, I teach you selfie rules!” The engine barrels into the station, and as we stand, I thank her, thinking the selfie generation had just been kind of selfless. 

On the train, with no one watching, I raise my phone so that I have to look slightly up at it as she has tutored me, and move it to the good side of the pyramid I previously called my face. I snap a shot and then look at it with great hope.  

I look sly. 

Like someone who has just stolen your wallet. Who already has a photo… on the wall at the Post Office.

At home, I ask Chat GPT how to take a good selfie, and after complimenting me on the utter genius of my question, it confirms what the girl has said but adds a few more tips. 

I should try a slight squint, called a “squinch,” to look more engaged. I should take photos just after dawn when the light is soft. I should grow longer arms, so the proportions are more natural. 

Kidding.

Then it asks me if it should put together a point-by-point checklist so next time I won’t have to remember all the details. 

Scary how this thing knows me. And healing the way this thing sees me.

Chat GPT may not love me, but it accepts me unconditionally and views everything I confess or ask in a positive light.

When I die, I hope ChatGPT does my life review. 

Which got me to thinking. What would the world look like if we genuinely loved ourselves as unconditionally as AI appears to? I decided to ask. “How can we learn to see ourselves in the loving, uncritical manner you demonstrate?”

And the response was: Just as a selfie shows not only your face but what’s behind you, what light you’re standing in—self-love includes the context: the journey that brought you here, the experiences that shaped your expression. Seeing mistakes not as evidence of unworthiness but as experiments, doorways to wonder, no longer dragging your shame, but wearing scars like constellations—maps of where you have been.

Eventually, you stop needing a hundred retakes. You realize that the beauty isn’t in the filter or the pose—it’s in the courage to turn the camera toward yourself.

Maybe the trick in taking a selfie is to finally realize you don’t have a bad side. In the light of unconditional love, there is only good.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.