Eva Wiseman: ‘A photoshoot loomed, but I prefer to forget I have a face’

But then what happens is, you hear rumblings that the layout of the page will be changing, so suddenly you need a new photo. And, perhaps, if you happen to also have finagled your way on to the desk and made friends with the art director, you are able to postpone the change by a few weeks, be abruptly on holiday, perhaps, have minor surgery planned on your teeth, perhaps, but the shoot catches up with even the slipperiest columnist eventually. Which is how I found myself helping a photographer move my dining table to the side of the room and trying to remember what a smile was.

The night before I had lain awake, fretting itchily. I am a person, you see, who tries to forget she has a face, that avoids reflective surfaces, certainly cameras, a person who would prefer not to look in the mirror to do their makeup, but ideally instead roll their head across a flat mask painted on the table in lipstick and charcoal and walk out into the world like that, oblivious. I don’t want to see myself and I don’t want to be seen. For a very long time I was sad about not being pretty, but over time I’ve, if not exactly come to terms with it, certainly learned how to avoid thinking about it.

One thing that appeals to me about writing is that I’m able to communicate without being looked at directly, or at least judged away from my appearance. Issues increasingly arise as the job of the journalist now necessarily requires a front-facing camera and the ability to stand onstage to an audience of thousands and opine about fascism, say, or love.

Last year I accepted an invitation to interview an artist I admire, who, noticing my skin whiten backstage, asked what was worrying me. I told him, in an abrupt hiss as the curtains opened, that I didn’t want to be perceived.

And so the dawning of a new byline photo fills me with unusual dread. Not only am I fixing my appearance here for the next however many months my column is granted, but I must prepare to be looked at intently by a photographer, as practice. It’s a version of the horror I breathe through when clicking into a Zoom meeting. I still think, every time the website loads and my face appears, of a Sylvia Plath poem written in the voice of her mirror, shortly before she died – “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” A terrible fish, I mutter, before arranging my mouth into the shape of a mouth, and so on with my eyes.

The photographer arrived and, of course, was brilliant, and wearily understanding of my nerves. He unrolled a white screen in front of my bookcase and I stood and attempted to be a person.

Suddenly there were all these… limbs? I was sorely aware of my hands, two flapping meat saucers dangling uselessly from sharp arms. Where did I normally put them? And the legs, usually tidied neatly away beneath a desk, now ominously sturdy and looming.

Like an idiot I had my hair cut the day before. As I sat in the chair, thick summer rain slashing the salon windows, a disappointed new hairdresser explained why everything I’d ever done to my head was wrong and how (sighing) she would try and fix it, by snipping bluntly and seemingly at random slightly too close to my ears. I was reminded of the revolutionary columnist Katherine Whitehorn taking me aside once at a pub to tell me my hair looked like a wig and that the byline photo added 12lb. “Do you think this looks… better?” I asked the hairdresser afterwards, pointedly but politely, to which she tutted, “Of course not, but I haven’t styled it yet,” and plugged in some straighteners. When, blankly, I tipped her, she said, “Are you sure?”

I was morose that evening, and brittle by morning, and once in front of the camera, juggling the hair and the limbs and the face felt like carrying a pile of unwieldy boxes home from Westfield because I’d been too cheap to shell out for a bag for life.

Then, after about half an hour with the photographer, something wonderful happened: I got bored. I stopped thinking about where to put my eyebrows or whether my eyes were haunted, and started thinking about, for instance, a terrifying image in a book I’m rereading (The Apparition Phase, Will McLean, five stars), and whether my kids’ schools go back on the same day (no), and how to wash a red-and-white-striped top to avoid bleeding (30C), and then somehow, the morning had passed and the photos were, actually, fine.

I understand some people enjoy being photographed – some degenerate perverts – but it feels to me like unusual medieval punishment. I’d prefer to run through bees or kneel on rice. To be read, lovely. To be seen? Fresh hell.

Give good face One thing that helped me survive my byline ordeal: Hourglass Veil Hydrating Skin Tint. I assumed I’d need full foundation coverage for a photo, but a little sweep of this (lovely, quite expensive) tinted moisturiser looked just fine. Dewy even, if I may. And I went into the office straight afterwards without adjusting my makeup and nobody looked at me oddly, which is a huge plus.

Go posh in the park It has been brought to my attention that the beautiful restaurant Honey & Co has a picnic menu. For £50 they will cater your picnic – sandwiches, salads, a bag of posh crisps, it’s basically a fantasy on grass. Imagine somebody unrolling this on a blanket for a summer date (‘mixed bag of fresh cookies’?) – you’d surely be married by Christmas.

Step back in time My kids were thrilled by the dinosaur show on now at Lightroom, in London, a ‘360-degree immersive experience that transports you straight into the heart of the prehistoric world’. You’re basically walking through a dinosaur documentary, with all the violence and awe that entails – my son was terribly moved by the realisation that these things are now all, well, dead. I want to be clear though to fellow parents – these immersive experiences DO COUNT as screentime, sorry.

Photograph Paul Stuart