Sarah's face, what a pity!

My mother is 59. In the Saudi culture she grew up in, women rarely took photographs. It wasn't just lack of access. It was another taboo. Cameras existed, but they weren't meant for women. A woman could live an entire life and be fortunate to have one photo marking her existence.

For my mother, that moment came on her wedding day. She was 16. That single image of her youth survived. Then, nothing. For years.

It wasn't until mobile phones with cameras arrived, maybe 23 or 25 years ago (if my math on our family's phone history is correct), that she could finally take a photo of herself and delete it if she wanted. That digital impermanence gave her courage. She took one. Just one. She looked at it, paused, and said: "Oh. I don't look like how I used to look. What a pity."

She never took another.

I think about that moment often. Did my mother truly not know that she had aged? Did she not know what her face look like anymore? Was my mother delusional? Women of her generation didn't take photographs, but they surely had mirrors. So how did it catch her so off guard?

I have two theories.

Perhaps mirrors show us only the present tense. When you look into one, you're negotiating with your reflection, adjusting your expression, your angle, your posture. But a photograph doesn't negotiate. It takes whatever face you're wearing in that split second and makes it permanent.

Or maybe there's something else at work. There's a quote I love in Journey By Moonlight: "You start off as Mr. X who happens to be an engineer. And sooner or later, you become just an engineer who happens to be called Mr. X." Maybe that's when the shift happens. In that somewhere between "sooner or later." When your adult role overtakes your name. When you become the function you serve. Then you hold on to that face, that last glimpse you had of you.

For my mother, that moment might have come the day she got married. She was no longer Sarah. She became a wife, then a mother, who happened to be called Sarah.

And so I wonder: is that what we grieve when we look at old photos? Not just youth, but the person who did not wear masks yet? The self who existed before roles defined her?

I honestly have no clue. I'm just blathering.

I've grown up in a different era. My life (and my face) has been constantly documented. I've probably taken hundreds of photos since I turned sixteen. I just took one yesterday. When would the memory of my younger face begin to distort? How long do I have before I lose touch with my own?

That moment may have already happened. After all, I'm the same age my mother was in the photo that startled her two decades ago. I'm my mother's daughter. I know I now carry the same face she pitied then.

Whether it's already happened or not, one thing feels certain: the distance between my sixteen-year-old self and my thirty-five-year-old face is more than half my lifetime. And that distance will only grow.

But here's the problem: I can't see myself clearly. My photography skills are tragic in ways I wouldn't wish on my enemies. And I am aware of my identity, my role in the world, and my profession. I'm too embedded in my own life to be objective about my face, just like I can't smell my own armpit, which is probably stinky in this weather.

I want my picture taken by a stranger. Someone who doesn't see "an engineer who happens to be called Mr. X," but simply a person with a face, in this moment. Only that stranger could accomplish this task.

So the goal, 20 years from now, I'll hold that photograph by the stranger next to a recent one and find one of three things:

• I'll be pleased that I stayed a continuous self. I lived in alignment, never drifted according to society.
• Or I won't recognize myself at all. It was a mask that I took off later. My true self hadn't emerged in that pic
• Or maybe that will be the last face that still felt like mine. And I’ll say: “Oh. I don’t look like how I used to look. What a pity.”

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Some of the inspirations behind this piece:

In 1919, King Faisal Al-Saud was 15 years old. In England, he saw his photograph for the first time. I don't know why, but there is something emotional about that picture. He had many different expressions on his face.

"Hidden Mother Portraits, c. 1860-1900, were a Victorian photography technique born from necessity. Long exposure times made it impossible for young children to sit still, so mothers would drape themselves in fabric, hide behind chairs, or crouch beneath heavy cloths to physically support their children during the lengthy process. The goal was to render the mother invisible while keeping the child perfectly positioned."

Not just my mother, but throughout history, women have gone to great lengths to stay invisible. I find these images incredibly haunting. For the children in the picture, as adults, how did they discuss that photograph? "Look at this ghost, that's my mother."

Also from Journey By Moonlight:

This is a man who’s managed to stay fixed at the age that suits him. Everyone has one age that’s just right for him, that’s certain. There are people who remain children all their lives, and there are others who never cease to be awkward and absurd, who never find their place until suddenly they become splendid wise old men and women: they have come to their real age.

My friend Hanel told me her 89-year-old grandfather was filling out an application that asked for his hair color (along with other things like height, eye color, etc). He wrote "black." The man genuinely didn't see that his hair had gone gray.