So… You’re insecure

You can’t cure your feelings, but you can control your actions.

By: Nina Naval Aug 11th, 2025

I don’t think I’m conventionally attractive.

In fact, a lot of the time, I feel like Boo Radley: human-turned-urban-legend used as a thrill for the immature and a Bogeyman for children. The photo above was part of a photoshoot I did for myself, which I titled: can i please be hot for once in my life. My acne scars are visible, my curly hair unkempt, my body hidden behind a pillow and under the biggest t-shirt I own.

Tate McRae’s Sports Car was blasting through my speakers, but my eyes stayed on the screen of my phone, where I was controlling the shutter. Every time I thought, “This one looks good,” I could see the strain—breath held, hips twisted, spine screaming. Out of forty shots, I kept ten, and in most of them, my body was still covered.

So what was the point?

Why did I think I looked better hidden behind a pillow or a blanket, than in my own skin?

Then, of course, comes this image, taken a few weeks before. Based on the amount of roots showing in the pillow picture before, I’d approximate this at about three weeks prior.

When this photo was taken, I was glancing at a softboxed light off-screen, wondering if that really was the right place to put it. A colleague I trusted held my camera for me as I contemplated lighting and had snapped this in the meantime. I had no thought of the camera or the person behind it: I was just doing my job, being myself, and getting tunnel vision that blocked everything else out. Meanwhile, Alexa and Natalie cheered me on in the background with wolf-whistles and woo’s.

Alexa was actually the person that chose this outfit for me.

“Not to sexualize you, but…” she had started, and I agreed without hesitation. Mainly because I personally didn’t even think there was anything to sexualize about it. I was thinking of the aesthetic of Behind-the-Scenes glamour. Marilyn Monroe in the dressing room putting on lipstick—kind of thing. I didn’t think anybody would look at it, at me, and go: hot.

It’s my favorite photo of myself to look at when I’m feeling insecure.

Not anything from the can i be hot for once in my life gallery, but this: when my friends were in the background with their loud assurances, and I couldn’t be less bothered because I was distracted by what I had to accomplish that day.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I’m a photographer, I look at myself with immense scrutiny. My self-portraits—used as practice and prep before shoots—are the harshest critiques I give myself. I dig and poke and prod until there’s nothing left to see, convincing myself that’s how it should be.

But it isn’t.

Because I can look hot. I just don’t feel hot when I do because I’m not thinking about it. Being attractive doesn’t come from having the perfect body: it comes from living fully within it.

I can feel like Boo Radley for the rest of my life. That doesn’t mean I am. That doesn’t mean I have to act like it.

Shutting myself away doesn’t fix my insecurities. Giving myself what I think would be “a perfect body” (which, somehow, is always perfect when it’s someone else’s body) wouldn’t fix it. If I give in and run toward that moving goal post, I’d never stop. I’d run myself into a miserable grave.

I’d run myself into the house in Maycomb.

Instead, I can meet myself where I am. I can look at myself and say, this is the body I have. And that’s it.

It isn’t hateful. It isn’t even celebratory. It’s just the body I have, and it’s the only one I’ve got. So I better be nice to it because I’ve got quite a few people I want to outlive. 

And I know there are people out there that would love to see me stay inside and invisible.

But I don’t have to be.

So I won’t be. And you don’t have to be either.