u/Big_Wheel5030

I have lived in 3 different countries and 10 different cities throughout my life and I first started moving when I was around 7 years old. Im about to move to a different country after being in my current country for 12 years and one thing that always hurt me is leaving my friends behind. Anywhere I went I made a group of friends before I had to move again and I would leave them behind, they would go on to create memories and grow up together without me and that is the case for every friend group I have had, and now I cant make friends anymore my social skills have gone down the drain and I feel like making friends is pointless because its a matter of time before I move again. I was just stalking a friend I knew from school he grew up in one city went to the same school and grew up with the people from the city and I think thats beautiful rather than looking around and finding no familiar faces and having to make new friends all over again. I think having childhood friends you grew up with is worth more than meeting new strangers and creating new memories together, don’t get me wrong both are beautiful in their own way but I think growing up in one place makes you feel more settled and gives you the ability to plan ahead for the future, it also gives you a sense of stability. Im grateful for having experienced so many cultures and meeting so many great people but when you have been doing this since you were a kid it gets exhausting.

I take daily videos of myself using the back camera to see how I look, I first started doing it as a form of exposure therapy to get used to my face how others see it (inverted) and I can say that it has worked and Im contempt with how I look in the back camera. It’s to the point where I’m more comfortable having my picture taken by someone where as before I would say no every time someone offered to take a picture of me and just hated being recorded or someone taking a picture of me. Even tho I like how I look in those videos I take I still feel ugly, my brain just fails to accept that I’m even slightly good looking, every time I look at the videos I take my brain convinces me that I’m actually way uglier in real life. If I take 20 photos and 17 come out good and 3 come out bad my brain just says that the 3 I look bad in are the most accurate to how I look in real life. I just feel ugly and I don’t know how to get over that feeling, does anyone have any advice on how to get over that feeling.

So backstory when I was 19 I fell into depression and ate my way out of it (I got really fat) and especially my face got really fat. Before I got fat I was really confident and wasn’t constantly worrying about how my face looks, but after I got fat that all changed I started seeing my face as ugly and my confidence was at an all time low. I have since lost the weight completely and now my face fat is fully gone, but then I started constantly worrying about my looks wondering if I’m ugly or not and I have so many off guard photos taken of me and I looked ugly in them sometimes and sometimes I would look okay but one thing was that I looked different in each one. So I started having face dysmorphia and have had it for a couple of years now. I recently started taking videos of my face using the back camera to see what I look like and in those videos I look really good but because I have so many different versions of my face I start to think that isn’t how I look and that those off guard photos taken of me are the real me. Why can I only accept the ugly version of me and not the attractive version of my face? Its like my brain completely rejects the good version even tho scientifically videos and you in motions is more of an accurate representation of how you look than photos.

So why cant I accept that and how do I start to accept the good looking version I see in videos and reject the off guard photos ugly version?