Dear Grotesque: I Really Debated Whether To Share A Big Photo Of My Face

Lit Salon on the highs and lows of putting ourselves out there, taking known risks, showing our faces, taking the flak for it, and doing it again anyway

Hi, everyone! Welcome (again) to all the new subscribers here. So so happy to have you. If this is your first edition of Lit Salon, this is the Monday feature where I answer questions you pose to me in the comments and via email, etc. Usually the questions are on some aspect of the literary life or specific writing-related challenges or other issues of creative complexity. Some of our most popular Lit Salon posts have included:

Dear Stuck: What Are We So Afraid Of (On creative paralysis and the strange and eternal heartbreak of finishing work + the radical freedom of ordinariness + the one thing that will close the gap between the work we make & the work we love)

Dear Not Enough: You Are Actually More Than Enough, I Promise (On what “enough” looks like in a writing practice + should we listen to the nagging voice that says we're falling short? + practical ways to make a writing practice work for you)

Dear Especially After Breaking: What If You Decide With the Full Force of Your Own Formidable Wisdom? (On whether to subject our tenderest, most vulnerable and heart-soaked material to the "brutality" of publishing + the magic of milkweed, crow & moon + a possible middle ground)

But today’s Lit Salon is a little different. Today’s Lit Salon addresses a question I got in response to last week’s mildly viral (but big for me!) posts on building this Substack from almost zero to 40K (now 50K) annual income in just 12 months. Most readers seemed to really love those posts and find value in them. A few didn’t, though. Like this guy.

Dear Jeannine:

I can’t imagine ever using a gigantic picture of myself to accompany a post. Why would you do that? How grotesque.

Signed,

Grotesque

Dear Grotesque:

It’s so interesting you bring this up, because I really debated whether to use a photo of myself. Choosing images for my posts is really time consuming in general because I don’t have an illustrator and am not good with digital illustration myself. I do have a subscription to Rawpixel, which helps, but this post felt really personal. It felt like maybe the right call to show my face. But, the truth is, I’ve always been camera shy and still am. I was wrenchingly, probably pathologically shy as a kid (I now know I sometimes suffered from a condition called selective mutism) and I was also very awkward. I mean, incredibly awkward—like, I sucked on my hair awkward. And like many women, I have had to learn—the slow and sometimes painful way—to find some peace and joy in my physical body, including the way it looks.

In the instance of last week’s post, I thought maybe, to accompany an essay where I’m breaking down exactly what I have done for the past 12 months to build my newsletter, it would be nice to include a photo of the real, very ordinary person behind the endeavor. To pull back the curtain, in a way. I wanted to say, “Hi! Here I am, it’s Jeannine, and I’m kind and approachable and welcoming, so come on in and stay a while!”

Because that’s the vibe of WITD.

Also, that photo was kind of a secret talisman for me, just a little something that had meaning under the meaning. I don’t know if you make little codes and secrets in your work, little gemstones only for you, but I do. And in this case, it was because that photo was taken on my 55^th birthday. I was so happy that evening, really joyful and