Paris | Diane Gallagher Photos

It has been months now since my last post. When we returned from Sicily, I hit the ground running and I haven’t slowed down since. But that hasn’t stopped me from taking pictures. I have been playing with the camera on my cell. It is surprising how good the pictures from an iPhone 4s can be. And in doing this, I have discovered the world of selfies.

Selfies are the pictures that people love to hate, yet almost everybody takes them. I found an article recently that claimed the following:

“For a generation that is overwhelmingly narcissistic, we are pretty ignorant to what we’re really saying with our ”selfies.” Worse yet, we’re not even paying much attention to how selfies are damaging our relationships.

No really, they are.”

“This is because people, other than very close friends and relatives, don’t seem to relate well to those who constantly share photos of themselves,” says Dr. David Houghton.

I would like to suggest that there other reasons for taking selfies than narcissism. I believe that selfies can be a celebration.

For years I hated having my picture taken. From my late 20s I started gaining weight. The heavier I got the more my desire to have my picture taken diminished. In this picture, I weighed about 273 lbs. If you look closely in my face, you can see the discomfort that lies just below the surface. At that weight, there was not a moment that I wasn’t aware of my obesity and how I appeared (or thought I appeared) to other people.

Over the past few years, I have worked hard and lost just over 100 lbs. But, I didn’t just work on the weight – in fact, the weight was almost incidental. Instead, I focused my efforts on the issues behind the weight gain… so many issues that had created an eating addiction in me. Slowly, the cravings to eat passed, my self esteem and self worth rose and, pound by pound the weight began to drop.

Today, I enjoy having my picture taken and taking my own picture. This is not vanity, this is gratitude for the new me – in a person who is happy and who is finding joy in her ability to me more active.

For the first time in my life I own hiking boots; I own them and I use them. My husband, Nick, and I, are planning to walk the Camino Portuges once we retire. We are walking now, and working out at the gym so that when we hit 58 and 60 we will be ready to backpack 350 kilometres from Porto, Portugal to Santiago di Campostella in Spain.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I had always wanted to wear a little black dress. For most of my adult life there was nothing “little” in my wardrobe.

I recently travelled to London and Paris with a group of teenagers. We walked 12 kilometres a day and I matched those kids, step for step. I could not have done this even one year ago – maybe not even 6 months ago. These selfies mark the wonderful time I had travelling with my students.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

So, I have invested some time and joy in selfies – and they will continue to document the life I have happily embraced!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Back in 2001, in the innocent days before 9-11, 20th Century Fox released the film Moulin Rouge! My daughter and I, always captivated by musicals, went to sit in the dark theatre, waiting for the movie to start. We weren’t prepared for the pastiche-jukebox musical come MTV video come sensory overload that was the Moulin Rouge! When the final credits rolled to a close, my daughter and I sat in the theatre with our mouths open, not wanting to believe that the movie was over. The next day found us back at the theatre to see it again. And again. And again. On our fifth and final theatre viewing, the theatre manager came into speak to the audience and introduce one audience member who was there to see it for the 18th time. We weren’t the only ones to be enamoured with Moulin Rouge!. I bought the film on DVD and we continued to watch it. I can’t say how many times I’ve seen Moulin Rouge! but every time I see it, it still captures me. That was four years before I met my husband, and Ewan McGregor’s smile and twinkling eyes had me drooling (actually, it still does but let’s just not say anything about that 😉 ).

Nine years later, Nick and my daughter and I were in Paris. Nick wanted to have an evening to himself, so Miyuki (my daughter) and I made our way to the Moulin Rouge. Now, granted it was over 100 years after the movie’s story took place, we were still hoping to capture some of the amazing feeling with which the movie left us.

When we came up from the Metro, we saw the line to buy tickets under the windmill was more than two blocks long. Instead, we wandered up and down the streets in the madness that still surrounds the Moulin Rouge. The energy was crazy. People were dancing, and running up and down the streets. Pockets of singing and shouting were breaking out all around us. French, English, Italian, German and other languages that I couldn’t place. We made our way down past the end of the line, around a corner and to our surprise, found an Irish pub. With part of our family coming from Donegal, it seemed appropriate, if a bit strange, to enter that Irish pub in the middle of Paris.

Miyuki and I sat and chatted and I treated her to her first Guinness while I sipped at my Coke Light. It was a wonderful evening – one of those common experiences that a mother and daughter sometimes share when all history and power barriers have dropped and only a mutual enjoyment of our time together was important.

Perhaps Moulin Rouge! was only fast moving images on celluloid, songs by other songwriters and a story that was simply fabrication. But this film created a mutual experience that my daughter and I took with us to the streets of Paris, to create a memory that we both will always hold dear.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.