On September 27, I was having a usual, homework-filled evening when I made the (arguably foolish) decision to check my school’s portal for it.

As my cursor hovered over my desired tile, I felt a rush of trepidation. As I put in the required password, excitement coupled with an underlying dread rushed through me. As the page loaded, anticipation coursed through my veins like adrenaline. 

I did a good job this time, I just know it. I convinced myself.

No, I wasn’t checking a standardized test score, nor was I on a quest to find feedback on my latest essay.  

I was in search of my school photo.

In the weeks leading up to picture day, I practiced my smile every time I looked in the mirror. Post teeth-brushing, I made it a point to mentally calculate the optimal neck angles for superior, flattering lighting and would couple my amazing neck angle with one of my aforementioned smiles.  

This year, I decided over the summer, my school photo was going to be fantabulous. I even made a list of things that went wrong with my freshman photo to ensure they wouldn’t happen a second time. Literally, nothing could go wrong – or so I thought.

All my smile practice, my picture day-related Google searches, my mirror staring, my fantasies of viewing a gorgeous, perfectly captured image of myself dissolved to ashes when I saw the hideous abomination that is, my sophomore photo.  

I stared at the photo with my mouth agape. Overlined eyes, overdrawn eyebrows and an overly tired face stared back at me. I resembled a knockoff Nefertiti.

Do I really look like that? I thought. Is my face really that asymmetrical? What possessed me to get a BLACK power chain?!? What happened to the smiles I practiced? That was not one of the smiles I practiced!

When I look back at the 2022-2023 yearbook (shout out to Cornerstones!), that version of myself will look back at me? 

But,  

If I’m being frank and toss my drama aside for a moment, the photo’s really not that bad. In fact, when I squint properly and take a step back, it looks almost tolerable.  

Besides giving me a reason to find a botched silver lining, the photo catastrophe has also made me realize a few other things –

1) I am privileged enough to have the opportunity to feel even the slightest bit of anger over a photo I deem sub par even though it was professionally taken of me.
2) Chasing after a good school photo is an almost hopeless cause, but I will attempt to pursue one anyway.
3) I have no need to take school photos seriously!

While it can be heart-twinging and gut-wrenching to see our try-hard selves pictured so catastrophically (I mean, who doesn’t like looking gorgeous in photos?), at least we get school photos and can laugh about them!  

Also, what fun would school pictures be if they weren’t even somewhat horrendous? Twenty years from now, after having a below-average day, seeing a perfectly framed picture of my teenage self would not cheer me up as much as seeing my weird attempts at eyeliner.

For those of you whose photogeneticism translates across the harsh lights and counterintuitive directions of school photographers, I’m happy for you, but as for me, I have made the decision that as much as I would love my next two high school photos to be utterly glamorous, I will never again pour as much time into them as I did into that sorry excuse of a portrait. 

So while my awful Form II picture gave me temporary heartache, it also gave me a good laugh, this article and a new item to put on my high school bucket list – “Have a good school photo.”