The person in the background of your photograph may be posing in somebody else’s at the same moment.

Everyone is simultaneously the subject of their own picture and a detail in someone else’s. You appear, unaware and uncomposed, in the backgrounds of photographs held by people you have never met, and they appear in yours, which means each of us is quietly distributed across strangers’ archives. Being minor in other people’s stories is the ordinary condition.

There is relief in it. You are not being watched as closely as you fear, and the version of you in the background of a stranger’s photograph carries no consequence whatsoever. Let that reduce the weight you put on how you appeared today to people who were mainly thinking about themselves.