What 6 Years of Selfies Will Show You

If you've been on the Internet long enough, chances are you've seen those "photo a day" compilations, where some one takes a picture of themselves every day and then puts them all into a video. Sometimes they're lots of fun, sometimes they're adorable, and sometimes they're more serious. When Rebecca Brown started taking a picture of herself every day in 2007, she was 15. Over the next six and a half years, she dealt with numerous serious problems, including depression, harassment, and a disorder called trichotillomania that causes people to literally pull their hair out when they get anxious. And the photos from those years tell one hell of a story.

The strange and universal truth about people is that they are always changing. That process is usually so slow that often times we don't notice it. But speed that process up, and it looks very different.

Watching Rebecca Brown's face change, major life events popping up along the sides, we see the effects of her depression, the toll that being stalked takes on her, the way the volume of her hair waxes and wanes again when life gets stressful. It's mesmerizing, in some ways, seeing the transformation that Brown undergoes in these years, watching things get worse then better then get difficult again.

In a comment on the video Brown writes:

Watching this back is rather scary for me, it makes me both sad and happy at the same time. I'm not an exceptionally happy person and don't pretend to be. What I will say is, that when you see the smiles in this, especially after the baldness happens... those smiles are genuine. I'd rather look back and see a project filled with honesty, than seeing 2000 photos of fake smiles.

Here, here!