Rewind to second grade. My third year of public schooling, and my school pictures had been adorable the past two years. But I mean, come on, what kindergartener or first grader doesn’t take the most adorable pictures no matter what the setting?

Alas, no one is as cute at 7 as they are at 6, and the curse begins. I sat down on the box and positioned my head to the way the photographer directed me, and before I had time to think about it, the flash went off.

A week or two later, when my mom pulled my pictures out of their packet to hang in the frame above our fireplace, my toothless smile was covered by an emotionless face.

School picture day has always been the most haunting of my days in USD 232 facilities. From the time I was in second grade, I have been stuck under the curse of taking the most awful school pictures.

I am not a very self conscious person, and I am very confident in my self and usually think I look okay in pictures. So, when I say my yearbook pictures are bad, I am not exaggerating.

My third, fourth and fifth grade pictures were nothing less, with short frizzy hair, crazy looking eyes, buck teeth that were disproportional to the rest of my face.

Flash forward to middle school, the curse continued but in a new way. As an awkward middle school girl, I was extremely worried about the way I looked, and my yearbook pictures clearly only made it worse.

I am not entirely sure what kind of cameras the Life Touch photographers use, but I do know they can detect any little flaw that may be consuming a student’s face. Every hair out of place and every tiny zit on your forehead is sure to be blown up in the picture so that it is the center of attention.

So, all through middle school, I continued to suffer the wrath of the terrible school photo curse. Eventually, my mom decided to quit spending so much money on school pictures, because it wasn’t like I was going to let her hang them up for the world to see anyways.

It doesn’t end there, either. High school just got worse, and the cameras began detecting even tinier zits. To put it short, my face looks as if I have chronic acne in my freshman year picture.

But wait, there’s more.

This past August, when I went to get my year book from my sophomore year, my friend from Mill Valley High School snatched it out of my hands and went running down the hall as I screamed for mercy, begging her not to look at my picture.

My sophomore year picture has to be the worst of all. I curled my hair and spent too much time on my makeup and practicing my smile in the mirror, determined to break the wretched curse. When it came time to see my picture I tried so hard in, I discovered it looked more like I was in horrible pain and I hadn’t brushed my hair in two weeks.

I have discovered that, honestly, there is no way to make picture day better, unless they opted to have everyone send in a selfie taken on their iPhone 6, or add four of the Instagram filters to our photos. This curse has claimed the reputations of many before me, and will continue long after I am graduated. I can guarantee my yearbook pictures will not be the first I choose to show my kids when they ask what I looked like when I was in school.