I Don't Trust Your Photoshopped Face

I'm a no to processed foods and faces

Ep. 150 I Don’t Trust Your Photoshopped Face

Spotify

AI created summary:

In this podcast episode, the host discusses her distrust of photoshopped faces and the underlying reasons why people feel the need to heavily edit their photos. She shares her own experiences of being called fat and lazy and explains that she is comfortable with these labels and does not need reassurance from others. The host believes that heavily edited photos indicate fear and insecurity, and she prefers to see the natural, unedited versions of people. She also discusses the importance of embracing our natural human abilities, such as psychic and mediumship skills, which she believes have been suppressed by societal systems. The host encourages listeners to reflect on why they feel the need to present a packaged image and to embrace their natural selves.

Unedited transcript below:

Speaker 1 (00:01):

Hey there, honey bunnies. Welcome to your Sovereign Storytellers podcast with your host, Laura. I'm Michelle Wolf. Today is a kitchen podcast. It's been a while since I talked to you while I was doing chores or making tea or whatnot, which I am, which reminds me I have to reheat the water. So you're going to hear the dishwasher in the background. And for those of you who've been around a while, you know that it may get noisy in the background while I'm doing stuff, but it doesn't feel natural to me to put out a perfectly polished podcast. Oh, the water's hot again already. It never has, did I say episode one 50? The title for this one is, I Don't Trust Your Photoshopped Face.

(01:01)

Sometimes I say things that I'm perfectly comfortable with about myself, and people feel like they need to say, oh no, it's you're not that. It's fine. I noticed this on Periscope when I would refer to myself as fat. I don't have a problem with the word fat. I don't need to get a bunch of, yay, let's be fat stuff because I don't need to be pumped up about it. It's not a thing, it's a shape of a body. My concern is some health things I have, but my health things aren't even related to my weight. Excuse me. So I noticed that on Periscope. Let me get this mic a little bit further away from my face. I'm probably popping. I noticed some Periscope people would be like, oh my God, you're not fat. It's fine. Oh gosh. Now just drop the phone, you guys.

(01:57)

I'm so sorry if that was super loud. Hold on. Okay, I'm good. Yeah. So they'd be like, oh no, you're not fat. And I'm like, but I don't mind being fat and you telling me I'm not fat when I clearly am overweight tells me that your concern is about image. And now I don't trust you because you're trying to make me, you're thinking you're projecting on me because you think I feel something that I don't feel at all. And you're telling me that it's very important to you not to look fat. And I don't get mad at people about it because that's their thing, right? That's a point of pain for them. It's not a point of pain for me, but it's fine. Like no, whatever. I'd usually just ignore it several times. Lots of times I refer to myself as lazy. And what I mean by lazy is I'm going to find the most efficient, least energy expenditure way to do something.

(03:10)

To me that's natural. Why wouldn't I preserve my energy? This is the part of me that must have always known. I'm a projector and I have limited energy, and it comes in cycles. So I'm hyper productive as I have been lately with Here's your second podcast and episode, and I've been writing a lot lately. I'm hyper productive when the energy is here because I know that the energy's going to dip back down again and I'm not going to be able to do shit. So while it's here, I work, but I work very efficiently. And I think the word lazy is funny. Nobody's lazy. People need to rest when they're arrested, they create, nobody just lays around doing that. Lazy is a capitalist construct, and it's so prevalent, I think, in America because we're our Calvinist, puritanical roots, whatever. Anyway, I don't want to go too far into that, but what it made me think, I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I'm not upset with people who are like, you're not lazy. You produce all the time. I'm like, yeah, I do in short bursts, and the rest of the time I'm horizontal. I'm reading a book or I'm writing posts flat on my back in bed. Y'all don't know what it looks like. I'm not hyper productive. That's a projection again and again, I'm not upset with anyone about it.

(04:40)

So to call myself lazy is meaningless to me. If I'm being lazy, that means I have time to rest. That means I have worked efficiently and yay me. But all of this to say what I have come to is why do I call myself lazy? And why does lazy feel good to me? And it did make me think when someone was like, you're not lazy. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. And then in the thinking, I was like, I'm looking for natural, natural energy flows, natural, cyclical, normal human, natural human ways of being. I'm looking for natural if I'm being lazy. To me, that's natural. I realize that my definition of lazy is probably not most people's definition, so I get it that sometimes a common, this is why I don't get mad about it, because the common definition of lazy is bad. The common definition of fat is bad.

(05:49)

It's not bad for me, but this natural human, so I've been yelling my head off about a natural normal human has full access to psychic and mediumship abilities because it's a natural part of our being when things changed in the world and we found agriculture, and then we created territories, and then we started killing each other over them, and then we started saying who could have access to the fruit orchards and who could hunt the rabbits for food and who couldn't? These were things imposed upon humanity from by unnatural, not that we have never made territories even as hunter gatherers, but there was as hunter gatherers, you're not raping the earth so much that things stay in balance. We didn't get too big in population.

(06:59)

Anyway, again, I'm trying not to go too far off tangent. There's so much energy lately, so much life force flowing through that I hardly know where to put it all. So I appreciate how y'all long-term listeners understand that. Eventually I'll get to the point and my podcasts are long. It's not natural to me to do an eight minute podcast Who can do that? I'm impressed with people who can do that, but I feel like they must write them ahead of time. I prefer a conversation because conversation feels natural to me. Yeah, okay. And that may be why my podcast doesn't grow very big, but I'm fine with that too. So it occurred to me in all these thinking about what's a natural human, to me, a natural human is the weight that they are, and they work with their health and they do whatever, and I'm never going to look like white America.

(07:52)

I'll never be stereotypical Barbie, even though all the Capricorn in me would love to be stereotypical Barbie. The other parts of me and all the heavy water in my astrology chart we're weird. Barbie we're weird Barbie and dealing with the conflict of really wanting to be stereotypical Barbie for so long and really rejecting weird Barbie has brought me further and further to this place. Okay, what is a natural human? What's normal for us? It's normal for us to be fully psychic and fully in tune and hearing our ancestors because that's what kept us alive, that let us know, Hey, you know what, Bob, something feels funky about the earth right now. I think we should move. And then here comes an earthquake. Or you know what? The air smells different. Something feels funky. My body doesn't feel comfortable here anymore. I think we need to move, and here comes the storm, right?

(08:51)

We're that at a most fundamental level, we're that from ourselves that we can't tell when it's going to snow. Now, some people can, the air smells different when it's about to snow. Air smells different when it's about to rain, even when there's no clouds in the sky and the weather forecast is not saying it yet. Your body is aware of two days from now we will have snow. Your body knows these things. Okay? I'm going to pause this for one second so I can get a sip of tea. I clearly didn't think this through because I was just making this gorgeous giant cup of tea, and now I just unplugged my headset. Oh gosh, you guys hold please. Okay, this feels like old periscope days. I'm dropping the camera. I forgot what I was going to say.

(09:53)

10 minutes in. The point of this is I know some coaches who do very good work, and I'm like, why don't I trust these? Someone asked me, would you sign up for this person? I was like, no, no. I would never. And even though her stuff is good, I would never sign up with her even if I could afford her. She's way out of my price range. But her stuff is really good, and I got access to it, some of it as a deal, but I wouldn't sign up with this person because immediately when I see the advertising, I'm repelled by it, absolutely repelled by it. It is photoshopped to the extreme, so extreme that it looks like AI created art. It's really on the far, far end of over edited, so over edited. And when I see that, it scares me. It literally frightens me because I know that I'm not seeing the real person. I am not opposed to some editing. I usually don't. But if I'm getting professional photos, they're probably going to be a little edited, but I don't want them. So I don't want my wrinkles to go away.

(11:27)

I don't want my freckles to go away. I don't want want to look like a normal or a normal is not a great word. I want to look like a natural, natural person, a natural human being, a natural 57-year-old human being who can't seem to get her hair together. I think my makeup's okay when I bother, when I bother to do it, but it looks so unnatural to me. And to me, that screams fear. The more edits there are, the more fear I detect, and my body will run from that because I don't want to work intimately with someone.

(12:19)

And doing coaching to me is intimate, even if it is business coaching. I'm coming into your world and I'm a wide open [Human Design] Projector. I have very little definition in my chart, so I'm this walking sponge, so I'm not going to come close to someone who has their fear energy. I'll work with my fear energy. I don't love it, but I will work with it because I know I have to, but I'm not going to douse myself in other people's fear and over edited shouts to me, this person is fearful. This person is very insecure. This person has bought into the myth that she has to hide herself. And now I'm speaking globally, not this person in particular, although whatever, an over-photoshopped face tells me that there's fear and insecurity present. It tells me that I don't get to see the real you. I only get to see the saran-wrapped, brushed-up, airbrushed photoshopped version of you.

(13:36)

And I don't want that. I don't want anything to do with that. That is the equivalent of human processed food. And I don't eat processed food because it tears me up and it flares up autoimmune stuff and it makes me feel terrible. I don't want to ultra processed food. I don't want ultra processed people. And again, I'm not criticizing the women who do this, and it's men too, but it's still more women than men, although maybe I haven't paid attention to this in the coaching world, I wonder if it's a more equal percentage of men doing it as well. Because of this, I got to be this packaged up product. So they've turned themselves into an ultra processed product, and I have no interest in that.

(14:31)

There's a few people in my life who overed their photos and they get away with it, but their levels of fear are not their. I can separate myself from them. I don't fall into them. I understand them. Or it's at a level that it's not as heavy, I guess it's more tolerable. Also, it's because I've gotten to know them maybe in other circumstances. And so the overprocessing stuff, it just doesn't impact me the same way. But I can tell you that the more, if I'm out there looking at people's stuff, an immediate, no, I don't know them or whatever, I don't know what I'm trying to say exactly, but what I'm trying to say exactly is I'm done with people who can't be natural. If you can't be a natural human, and that doesn't mean, again, it doesn't mean you don't ever edit a photo, but it means that there's also some photos of you that your wrinkles show or your scars show or your freckles or things that might not be considered photo worthy.

(15:54)

They get to have a place. They're also part of it. I tried to teach a course a long time ago and part of on crone stuff, and I was ahead of the game, and then I noticed that other people started teaching it a few years later, and it was pretty much the same format. I'm not saying they stole my idea because I don't believe that, but there is this desire to be a more natural face, but I couldn't get it off the ground. People didn't want to look at their wrinkles. They didn't want to look at aging. It had a few tiny little handful of brave women took that. And then I was like, okay, I'm not in the alignment with the timeline.

(16:43)

This isn't going to work. So I don't trust photoshopped faces, not because they look bad. I do think they look bad. They don't look natural at all, but it's the underlying reason why someone would care that much that they would over edit the shit out of their photos. I don't trust it. If someone is that concerned with their physical presentation, then that's a value for them, and they're going to, whether they know it or not, they're also going to be judging my physical presentation. I can't relax with someone who's always crying about being fat, not because I care about me being fat, but because it's indicating a level of fear that I don't want to be around. I feel like I'm being very unclear about this. So here's what I'm asking. I will make this short. I do to get to work, and I care about this because just like we can't live on processed food, the unnatural colors of processed food like Doritos or Cheetos or other kinds of chips or food from McDonald's, it's not natural colors. It's not a natural taste. It doesn't digest. We can't digest it. We can't live on that. And as a human species, we can't live ultra processed either. We can't live well without our psychic and mediumship skills being developed, and now that we have to deliberately develop them because they were brutally repressed in us. You can't make people behave.

(18:47)

If they're in touch with their power, they won't listen to you. They'll be like, why would I let you charge me for food when there's a whole forest available? Why would I come work all day for you when I can feed myself from the woods? And they're like, oh, well, watch this. We're going to put a fence around the woods, and if you try and take the food, we're going to kill you. So now come work for me. A part of that shift in humanities course involved getting rid of ancestor communication and normal and natural human psychic abilities. They had to cut them off. No one's going to comply with those early roots of capitalism if they can hear otherwise. So ultra-processed food is killing us. Ultra processed faces indicate people are dying. That's a toxicity thing.

It's an indicator of someone who won't look at their shadow, doesn't look at their shadow. It's an indication of unhealth dis-ease. It's an indicator of someone that I will never be able to relax around. I'll always have my guard up because they have their guard up. They're not letting their guard down. I'm seeing an ultra process person in front of me. Then I am not safe.

(20:41)

I don't feel safe, and I go further than not feeling safe. And I go into, I feel afraid. I feel afraid of them. Everyone, whoever hurt me in my life wore a mask and presented themselves as something they were not. So now that might be why my reaction might be a little excessive, but it's like, oh, are you wearing a mask? Get the fuck away from me. I don't want anything to do with you. I don't want your photoshopped face in my face because packaged people did quite a bit of damage to me. So

(21:41)

If you are processing your face, here's what I would encourage. I don't want anyone to feel bad, but I want you to notice what that might mean. Why is it so cringey or shame inducing or worrying that you would take a selfie and just put it on the internet without, I've noticed that you can't even post a really raw photo. My camera is doing some sort of processing by itself. There must be some kind of setting on there like, wait a minute. I know that my forehead has more wrinkles than that camera. What are you doing? Is it that bad? Is our camera like, oh no, honey, you don't want to put this picture on Facebook. Let me help you. Isn't that horrible? I want you to ask yourself, why would I ever be afraid of letting my real face show? Why am I afraid to be a natural human? What systems have contaminated the person I see in the mirror so that I don't even see her or him or they them? Clearly? What belief system am I coming from that makes me think I can't put my regular face on the screen? Why do I feel like I won't get clients unless I present this ultra overprocessed image? It used to be you only saw that real estate. Have you ever thought about this? It used to be it was the real estate women that were overblown like the aquanet queens and the makeup, and then it was religious. The televangelist people and their wives that were overdone, like, girl, how much hairspray did that take? What sort of pancake, makeup shit are you wearing? But now it just spread and spread and spread.

(24:02)

These days, some models even look less processed than I see on Facebook coaches. So now it's like it was in real estate, it was in the Televangelism world. Now it's in the coach world. I can't be a high-dollar coach if I don't slap a lot of shit on my face and wear fake eyelashes and do all this stuff. And this occurs to me too, now that I'm talking to you. It may be that some people who do over process and are insecure about their looks, but it's more of a personal thing for them. Maybe they aren't as triggering because these women are very triggering to me, and maybe because it's coming from

(24:56)

What am I trying to say? Strategic place. I have to look like this to make you give me your money to get you in the door. That might be different, a different energy. I bet there's more to this. I can't quite get all the threads here probably because I haven't drank my tea.

So anyway, here's the question I want to leave you with. How comfortable are you with your natural rhythms as a human being?

How much pressure do you put on yourself?

When your energy is low, how much processing are you doing to your face?

And why? What's under it?

You know me, I always want to lift the rug and be like, Hey, what's under there? What are you hiding? I'm always looking in the closets. Which skeletons have you got squirreled away back here. Let me see. Let's bring them out.

Let's have a tea party with the skeletons; what's underneath the desire to present a packaged face?

What's underneath the fear that someone might call you fat?

What's underneath the disturbance that someone might think you're lazy? Oh my God, someone thinks I'm lazy. Oh no, what's under it? What's under it? What's driving that?

If you're low energy, why do you feel like you can't say that? Or why do you have to feel like you? Conversely, why do you have to always say you're tired when maybe you're not tired?

There's a flip side to that, right? It's not okay to be full of life force, and energetic and happy when other people around you are like, oh, I'm so tired.

(26:41)

What's driving our bullshit? Maybe that's what we're getting to. What is driving our determination to not tell the truth and not be as we are in any given moment? On a Tuesday at 8:55 AM Eastern, why can't we just be who are in the moment? Some days I'm tired, some days I'm on fire. Some days I don't give two shits what pictures get posted on Facebook?

Other days, I'm like, oh, that's a terrible angle. I won't change it. But I do kind of wish it was a better angle, and then I just go on about my day.

What keeps us from being normal, natural humans?

What freaks us out about being mediums and hearing from our dead?

What is wrong with that? Nothing. Why are we so freaked out by things like this?

What is going on in the back of the closet?

That's where I'm going to stop my tea’s getting cold. I love you all so much, and until we meet again, contemplate these questions. Lemme know what you think. Facebook forward slash LauraMichelleWolff. Instagram @thewolffcodes. Until we meet again, think less. Feel more. Talk to you later.