Dear Felix,

when you start analyzing your idea of posting a photo of yourself without glasses, you slip right into obsessive thinking. You want to post it because you think you look better without glasses, but then you immediately come up with various scenarios of how people might react, and how either of your choices (to post or not to post) might backfire. You create a huge mountain of potential problems, which causes you anxiety and wastes your time and energy – your precious time and energy that you could use for something productive. Thinking in this way isn’t helpful – it’s your internal saboteur.

You asked me if it’s wrong to post a picture of yourself without glasses sometime in the future. As we’ve discussed before, what’s important when you post is your intention. If you intend to attract attention so to receive praise and validation from people – because without it you feel bad about yourself – then it’s not a good intention. Because it comes from your wound, from a place of lack. Or if your intention is to make that girl jealous – it also comes from a wounded place, not from a place of healthy self-esteem.

The only good motivation to post a photo without glasses, in my opinion, is if you’ve switched to contact lenses, and this is your new look. Otherwise, if you post it just because you think you look better without glasses – but you wear glasses all the time – I don’t see much point. People might ask you “oh have you switched to contact lenses? And then you’d need to answer “no, I just posted it because…”, and you might find yourself in an awkward situation because you probably don’t want to admit publicly that you think you look better without glasses. So it might cause you unnecessary embarrassment, i.e. unwanted attention.

So whatever you post, ask yourself: what’s my motivation? If it comes from your wound, from needing people’s validation because you feel bad about yourself – don’t post it.