Why, in my fantasy life, Annie Leibovitz is my best friend and travels with me everywhere I go

I was spending the day with a friend of mine recently when she showed me some pictures from a recent family trip. I noticed almost immediately that there weren't any pictures of her, and when I asked about it, she said, "I don't like having my picture taken."

I get it. I really do.

Because that was my attitude most of my adult life—until a few years ago, I HATED having my picture taken and looked pretty awkward almost every time I was forced to do it, which I talked about in my "Who is the girl in the picture" post. I'm still not great about posing for photos now, but I'm working on it and try my best to have a good attitude, which I think is crucial to taking a good photo.

Lately, though, I'm beginning to wonder if it's about more than just having a good attitude. Over the past few months, I've had the opportunity to have my picture taken by more than one professional photographer, and I am always shocked by how good the results turn out. (The photo of me above was taken by one of those pros.)

As a result, it started to occur to me that maybe the reason I hate having my picture taken is because I don't have a professional doing it all the time. In fact, it's usually my husband or one of my friends taking my picture, and they usually do it quickly—in between talking and hanging out—without really thinking about it.

All of this had been in the back of my head when I saw a new photo of a friend on Facebook and actually thought, "Wow, that doesn't even look like her. She is so much more attractive than that." And that's when it hit me—the reason our photos don't look as good as the ones we see in magazines is simply because we don't have a professional photographer following us around all the time.

Maybe this sounds obvious, but I have witnessed too many people—men an women—bemoaning the way they look in pictures for me to believe that people understand this is the case. I think we all want to look like a celebrity every time we have our picture taken even though we don't have half the resources that most of them do.

And then I saw something that made me sure that taking a good photo doesn't usually happen by accident but rather requires some serious effort as well as a professional photographer.

I was watching Letterman a few weeks ago when Courtney Cox was on the show talking about a recent trip to St. Bart's. While she was there, Letterman held up this photo of Cox from that trip:

Letterman oooohed and aahhed over Cox's amazing physique, but she resisted the compliment, explaining that she doesn't normally look like that and that she was doing everything she could to look her best when the photo was taken.

"Well, Dave," she said. "You know when the paparrazzi are there, so that's not real . . . I mean that's real, but I was working it pretty hard . . . We made a joke about it. Let's see how Sports Illustrated we can get. And I really was like . . . I sucked in, I moved my body, and my arms are streched out. I don't walk like that!"

Cox even claimed that Letterman would be horrified if he saw the way she sits on the beach when nobody is looking and imitated herself seaside, hunched over and limp.

Whether you believe it or not, her message was clear: people don't normally look the way she did in that photo. And for some reason, I believed her. I believed that she could suck in her gut and pump her arms and legs in such a way that put her best features on display.

Do I believe I could strike the same pose and appear as hot as Cox does in her string bikini? No way, but I do believe that trying to look good and believing you can look good goes a long way towards accomplishing that goal.

And while writing this post, I decided to Google "Courtney Cox at the beach" to see if there were any pics of her looking the way she described, and believe it or not, one of the first pictures I came across was one of Cox looking the same way she imitated herself looking on Letterman . . .

Is she still beautiful? Absolutely. But she also looks real because she's not posing for the paparazzi.

It's easy for us to imagine that the beautiful people look beautiful all the time, but the truth is, when they're just being normal and goofing around with their friends and an iPhone, they take crazy photos too.

The only difference is that their bad photos never show up on Facebook.

People don't change, but that doesn't mean you can't

When you’re young, the haters let themselves be known—they toss ugly comments at you in the hallways of junior high and high school like emotional grenades—causing you to cry in the bathroom but also making them easy to identify.

At that age, you’re too immature to understand that these people are not worthy of your tears, but by the time you’re in your twenties, you realize how much time you wasted worrying about what that jackass Tad Hightower said about your pimples in fifth period Spanish class.

But as you get older, the haters become harder to spot.

Like the rest of us, they learn that certain behavior—puking in the bushes, mocking the kid with glasses in the hallway—is not acceptable for adults. At least adults who want to make it in the adult world.

Because of that, it’s easy to think that the haters die out as we age, that people mature and become more kind. That’s why people are always quick to point out that kids are cruel—as if their cruelty can be excused by their age.

The thing is I don’t believe that kids are any more cruel than adults. It’s just that the cruel adults are better at hiding their depravity. No, they can’t call the obese woman in the office a whale like they did in middle school, but they can do other, less obvious–but almost equally hurtful—things.

They can casually mention the fact that they don’t eat sweets after three in the afternoon while everyone else is noshing on the snickerdoodle cookies your best friend brought to work for your birthday. There’s nothing obviously wrong with turning down the cookies, but deep down, the comment hurts—you and everyone. And you think, “maybe I wouldn’t be ten pounds overweight if I didn’t eat sugar after three either.” And for years, you let comments like these eat away at your self-confidence, like a twenty-four-hour buffet of your soul.

But eventually you grow wiser, and you see that even though they are veiled under a screen of politeness, comments such as these are meant to wound. They’re not coincidental. They’re meant to undermine and destroy—without you even knowing that you’re being attacked.

And when you finally figure this out, it’s as if someone has just turned on all the lights in the room. You can finally see things clearly. These are the same people who beat up the boy in the glasses after school, the same ones who wrote the word “slut” on your best friend’s locker after she lost her virginity. These are the haters. Only they’re smarter now and much more sly.

And when you figure this out, you remind yourself again what you’ve known for years . . .

The haters don’t matter.

All that matters is you. And what you think of yourself. The fact that you know you look beautiful—with or with those ten pounds—and that you are intelligent and funny and a hard worker and successful and a good friend, a good person even.

And the next time the haters start to spew their venom-filled crap, you won’t even hear them because you’ll be too busy listening to your internal monologue: you are amazing, you are amazing, you are amazing, you are amazing . . .

A few years ago, almost everyone I knew from grade school and high school got on Facebook and started friending each other. Since I moved away from my hometown in high school, the experience was incredibly cathartic for me—finally, I was able to find out what happened to all of my old friends, finally I had the connection to my childhood I had lacked for so many years.

But after a few months, I noticed that one of my “friends” had unfriended me. This wasn’t someone I barely knew. This was one of my closest childhood friends—I say this despite the fact that it was also someone who hurt me on a regular basis. Still, it wasn’t something I ever said anything about when we were kids—like so many people, I just put up with the cruelty, and we remained friends as long as we knew each other. So I couldn’t figure out why she had unfriended me on Facebook and stayed “friends” with the rest of our classmates.

It was so confusing to me that I emailed another good friend from grade school and asked her opinion about it. I will never forget what she said to me.

“Molly,” she said, “People don’t change.”

She didn’t explain much more than that, but I knew what she was saying—that it may seem like people are mature, responsible adults, that it may seem like they are good people, but that deep down, a person’s character is somewhat set in stone, that someone who hurt you then will hurt you now, and that all we can do is accept that, move on, and focus on ourselves.