I am one of those people who never like the way they look in photographs or videos. As soon as I realise that a friend or relative is pointing a phone at me, I turn my back, cover my face with my hands, and say, “No, I’ll look bad, stop it, I’m not photogenic.” But some time ago I happened to find a photo of myself at 17, and I liked it so much that – extraordinarily – I had it framed and put it on display on a bookshelf. Everyone – friends, relatives – who saw it was puzzled: how pretty you look, is that really you? Even a person who’s known me for decades and is very fond of me said, after praising the image, “But to tell you the truth, I don’t think you really looked like that.”

Eventually, I, too, had to admit that I liked this picture precisely because I didn’t at all resemble the image I usually had of myself. Was it possible that I had had those features only at 17, at the end of a painful adolescence (like almost every adolescence)? Hard to say. When I think about that year, it doesn’t seem to me that I was especially satisfied with myself, or with my appearance, something that the photo would have justified. Rather, I had to admit that at the time the image hadn’t particularly struck me – maybe I considered it just one of the many I would happily have torn up. Or probably I hadn’t disliked the photo, but, because I didn’t have a high opinion of myself, I hadn’t recognised myself and had immediately forgotten it.

Had I looked like that only in the fraction of a second in which the shot was taken? Was there something wrong with the camera? Was that image an invention of the device? But then, how had I reached the point, today, of framing and displaying it? Did I want, in this phase of my life, to deceive myself, to remember myself as I had never been?

It seems to me that I found the answer this morning, writing. A “me” was photographed that does in fact exist, but which doesn’t coincide with what I normally was and am. It’s a “me” showing off the best of myself, thus escaping my usual physical appearance. And I don’t think it’s just me who experiences this – it can happen to anyone. It’s the very rare moment when, after successfully getting through an ordeal, after a courageous gesture, after some miraculously creative act, we say to ourselves, in amazement and satisfaction: “I would never have believed I was capable of that.” It’s the moment when everyone – even the camera – says to us: “Ah, how well you look today.” A different “I” is released, happy in every cell, and so even our face is different.

Then, like an aquatic divinity that is visible for only a few seconds, we are swallowed up, to return to our everyday aspect.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein