 I take a lot of selfies. I started taking selfies in 2011 before it was cool, before there was a hashtag, before I had Instagram. So I posted them to Flickr, which now has far too many pictures of me in my feed. And then selfies became popular, and they started getting a really bad rap. People were saying that they were making us egotistical, selfish, and shallow. But what they're not talking about is how it's improving how we see ourselves and how we love ourselves. So I'm going to tell you how that worked for me. So in 1977, I was born to a woman who was expecting a bouncing baby boy. And I'm not. And she also was hoping that I would be tiny and blonde like her. I'm not. And she was disappointed with me from the very first minute that she laid eyes on me. And it only got worse from there. As I got older and fatter, she got more and more disappointed with me. And so I had to live under this umbrella of her heavy disappointment and how I looked. And her not very subtle ways of telling me that she didn't approve. And my dad's often misguided attempt to kind of balance it out, which usually made things worse instead of better. So in 2011, I realized that I had gone an entire month without looking at my face in a mirror. I didn't look at my body anymore. I put clothes on. And I tried to ignore the fact that I was not just a brain that I have a body. I had learned through society's expectations that my body was not the right shape. And it was immensely challenging for me to find clothes that I liked that were fun. My sense of style has always been very quirky. The fashion industry has only recently caught up to the fact that fat people do not, in fact, want to spend their entire lives wearing moomoo's. Not a thing. So in 2011, I had this realization. I had not looked at my face in a month. And I was like, OK, I really like my face. And I really like self-work. And I like to challenge myself. So I decided that I would challenge myself to take a self-portrait every single day for a month. This was the hardest thing I had ever done. I hated myself about two minutes into this promise to myself. The very first selfie I took, I took literally 600 pictures. And I hated them all. Like, I can't really look like that. I just got to get the lighting better, or the angle different. Maybe if I do this crazy, like, yeah, that angle, that's a good angle. That's a really good angle. But I really stuck with it. I promised myself I was going to do 30 days. And I really stuck with it. And what I discovered was after 30 days, I could look at my face. But I was still ignoring the rest of me. So I decided that I was going to challenge myself to do another 30 days. And this time they weren't going to all be face selfies, because I had really nailed the face selfie. I had it down. I could get the lighting right. We had this wall in our house where we didn't have any paintings. I called it the selfie wall, because I could stand in front of that backdrop, and the lighting was perfect. Oh my god, it was great. I still actually have a selfie wall every time we move. I'm like, oh, this will be the new selfie wall. So I did another month of self-portraits. And this time I started putting my phone down. And this was before we had lots of gadgets. So I would have my son push the button, but you can't hold the camera, because then it's not selfie. The camera has to be propped up just right, and all you have to do is reach around and touch the button. Don't look, because you're going to have to push this button 600 times. And I'm going to hate every single one of them. And if you look at them and you say that you like them, then you're going to be really sad when I delete them. So that is how I managed. It sounds so ridiculous now. That's really funny. So I started taking lots of pictures of my whole self. And that was awful, awful. I was forcing myself to look at my body in a way that I had never looked at myself before from bizarre angles. I was like, how many rolls do I have? Are we supposed to look this way? Like, what color is my skin under there? Like, whoa, yeah, really crazy. And my self-esteem, which I had hoped would go up, went very down. After 30 days of that, I started to notice toward the end, and I mean, it took like 27 days, toward the end of the month my self-esteem started coming up. And I started noticing when my friends would take pictures of me, I wouldn't hide. I wouldn't shift in that way that we shift. Like, oh, no, not this side. Let me fix my hair. And let me, oh, I got to make sure that I'm sitting like this. Now you can go. Be sure to get my boobs, because they're amazing. And you know, like the things that we do when people take pictures of us, it took me, I can't do math, two months, almost exactly, to get to where I didn't do that anymore. But at the end of the second month, I still didn't really love my body. So I decided to do another month, and then another. And at the end of the year, I decided, okay. So that wasn't hard enough. This time I'm gonna challenge myself to take a selfie every single day for the entire year of 2012, because I didn't hate myself enough. So I did. I took a selfie every single day. For an entire year, I was sick, of course. I had days where we would travel and I would take a picture of my feet at the airport because it's all I could handle. Like, please do not look at me when I've been on an airplane for 15 hours. I did it for a whole year. Every single day, took a selfie. I got really, really tired of looking at myself. But what I noticed was every month that would pass, and it was not a sudden thing. It was not this magical shift where suddenly I'm in love with myself. But every month that would pass, I hated my body a little bit less. I started encouraging myself to go close shopping and finding clothes that didn't totally suck. And then I, so I was making upward progress, and I was doing really well. And then, I got hit by a car. And my self-esteem that I had lovingly crafted and worked so hard to gain was gone. Because now I have to look at myself sitting down. And when you're round and you sit, you become even rounder. And I had issues with the first wheelchair that we bought. It was too narrow. But instead of thinking the chair is too narrow, I thought my body is too big. And my self-esteem was totally gone. And I felt really broken. And I was just full of this hate. And I stopped looking in the mirror. And I stopped taking my selfies every day. And I felt lost and alone. And really, really sad. A lot of the time. And my whole fashion sense had to change because you can't wear long drapey skirts in a wheelchair because your wheels get tangled. And it's very bad and you could fall and that's even worse. So I went through this period where I wasn't taking my selfies anymore. I wasn't looking at myself anymore. I was back to where I had been in August of 2011. And then I challenged myself. My friend Vivian McMaster teaches a class called Be Your Own Beloved. And it's a 28 day selfie project, a very gentle prompts where you get a prompt in your email every day and you follow the prompt and take a picture and she starts with your feet. So the very first selfie that I took of myself in the wheelchair was of my feet. But my feet don't look the same anymore because now they're on foot pads, pedals. I'm not even sure what the lingo is. And it felt so weird to look at this group where there were all these people of taking pictures of their feet on the ground, in the grass, whatever. And mine are in this wheelchair. And I took a deep breath and I kept on going. And I went through the whole project and I did 28 days of taking selfies of myself. And again, I'm taking hundreds of selfies and deleting 99% of them and not really liking them. But every once in a while, there's that one that I did like. And every once in a while, I'm finding that I don't hate the way I look. And then I discovered leggings and Etsy. This is a really fantastic combination. So then I started finding clothes that I really loved and that makes such a huge difference because when I take selfies, I want to record myself looking good, as good as I possibly can. And so I started wearing clothes that made me feel good and taking selfies that were starting to make me feel good. And again, it's one step at a time, which is funnier now. It's just one selfie at a time, one push at a time. I can take one selfie in this way. I can take another one in this angle. I can take pictures of myself that don't even include my wheelchair or I can take pictures of myself that are far back. Now we have timers on our iPhones, which is fabulous for my wife because she doesn't have to push the button 600 times. So I can take the, I can put the camera further back and have it take a picture of all of me. And now I'm looking at all of me and I'm realizing, again, day at a time, 6,000 photos at a time, that I just look like a person. I look like me. I look like me sitting down because now I can't stand. And that's not so different from anybody else when they're sitting down. And so my self-esteem and my self-love gradually started coming back. So when we talk about selfies and we talk about the narcissistic, egotistic thing that you get into when people who take pictures of themselves all the time must be really egotistical, I have taken probably in the neighborhood of 2,000 selfies at this point. I've published more than a thousand of them on my Instagram feed, so I warn you if you follow me on Instagram, guess what you're gonna see? My cat and my face. So the trick is when you do anything like challenging what society expects of you, you can't, you really, really can't expect to take one selfie and be like, score, my self-esteem is fantastic. I no longer need the man to tell me what I look like because I look amazing because it doesn't go away like that. I have taken so many selfies and still I have days where I don't look right or I feel like people are judging me because I'm fat. People are judging me because I'm in a wheelchair and mostly they're not and that's the other thing that I've learned is that people are not paying any attention to me because they're too busy judging themselves. So the thing that I wanna do is a little bit of audience participation. If you have, I bet everybody knows where we're going, if you have a camera phone or if you are sitting next to somebody who has a camera phone and all please talk, don't just assume that the person next to you is like, please help me take a selfie. I think it would be really great if we all took a selfie of ourselves, your neighbor if they want you to. If you ask your neighbor, hey would you take, can I borrow your phone or take your own selfie? Push your own button. I have my phone handy, I'm gonna do it too. So I'm gonna tell you some of my tricks. First, this angle, do not be ashamed. This is a really fantastic angle. Get your lighting, you know, like if you're in the shade, kinda lean a little bit so you're in the light. Look at the dot. The dot is where you want to look because that's your camera and then it looks like you're looking right at the camera. Oh you guys, you're all doing it, it's so lovely. That makes me so happy. Yeah. And you don't have to like it and you don't have to post it and you don't have to ever show it to anybody else ever. But if you start there one moment, one selfie and just look at yourself and just send yourself a little bit of love. Hey, that's what I really look like because it's okay, whatever you look like. Whatever I look like when I'm sitting, whatever you look like when you're sitting, whatever I look like when I'm standing, which is rare but I still do it sometimes for fun, it's different. And if you feel really brave, you can post it and if you wanna tag it with the alt conf then I can come through and give you some love too. And if you want me to help you with your selfie, you can come up to me during the break, I would love to. And I think the biggest thing that I've learned, the thing that I want you to hear the most is that we are all perfect no matter what we look like. Thank you.