The Portrait of a Lady That's amazing! You're amazing! That's astonishing! You're astonishing! For a day and a half, I had been rehearsing these phrases with the proper expression on my face: a subdued, sort of quiet surprise. No big emotion, just slightly widened eyes and a bland, pleasant smile. My husband had suggested the phrases - "amazing" and "astonishing" being words that can be construed to mean almost anything. No matter what I felt when I saw my portrait, I just had to remember my lines, and I would be fine. About a year earlier, I had bought a raffle ticket from someone whose choir was raising money. None of the prizes listed appealed to me. Then I realized that since I never won anything anyway, I could designate anything at all as my preferred prize and, in effect, make a donation. So I picked an oil portrait to be painted by an artist with a connection to the choir. And I won. I didn't know what to expect when I went for my sitting. I took an industrial elevator to the fifth floor of an anonymous beige building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. I knocked on a gray metal door, and the artist, a pretty, slender woman who looked to be in her mid-30s, let me in. She showed me some of the paintings and portraits in her no-nonsense studio, and I was all admiration - they were excellent. After she explained to me how it would work, she sat me down in a chair by a big window and snapped picture after picture of me while we talked. At our next appointment, we looked at the photos together. When the artist showed me the one she had chosen to work from, I was appalled. The photo did not flatter me. I sat there, unsmiling, looking straight at the camera with a small part of my face in shadow. The black top I was wearing, the way I was sitting in the dark chair and the light from the window combined to create what I saw: a tired, round face floating above a lumpy, undifferentiated mass. She explained why, from an artistic point of view, this would make such an interesting composition. I explained why, from a human point of view, I wouldn't like to live with this image of myself. As I looked through the photos again, I pointed out others I thought would be better. But, although she was pleasant, I wasn't sure I had convinced her. Several weeks passed. Why did it matter so much what likeness of me the artist had chosen to paint? Why did it make me so anxious? I suppose it's because a portrait is an exterior view of yourself. A photograph is, too, but a photo is the product, in part, of a mechanical object. Everyone knows that people are or are not photogenic. Even those of us who "take good pictures" know that sometimes the shutter closes in the middle of a blink. There's also the mirror. Like most people, I have a relationship with the mirrors in my life, especially my bathroom mirror. I compose my face in front of it, but I suppose I also compose my face before I confront it. I'm so used to the images that my mirrors and I have agreed upon that I'm sometimes startled by a glimpse of myself in an unfamiliar mirror. Those images I usually ignore or forget. A portrait is different because it reports how another person sees you. If there is something unattractive about you in a portrait by a good artist, the odds are that, sometimes, from a certain angle, that's what you look like in real life. And I had seen before, in her studio, that she was a good artist. I thought I was on my way to discover what the world sees when it looks at me, and the prospect frightened me. I was in the studio again before I knew it. After the briefest of preliminaries, the artist pulled a canvas out of a rack and set it on an easel. "Oh," I said spontaneously, "it's beautiful." I meant it. The image before me was not the one I had disliked. In fact, I didn't remember this image at all. It was a good likeness of me in profile. It didn't look like a young woman, but neither did it look like the very tired older woman the artist had wanted to paint before I objected. It was the profile of a nice-looking woman. The artist and I laughed together when I told her the phrases I'd rehearsed and why. "You must think that's weird," I said. "Not at all," she replied. A portrait is a very personal thing. As I think about it now, it occurs to me that if the artist had painted an image of me that I didn't like, I could have buried it in the back of a closet. That's what we did some years ago with a portrait of my husband that just didn't look like him. And that's what we could have said, that this portrait didn't look like me. But the doubt would have lingered. When Robert Burns wrote, "Oh, would some Power the giftie give us/ To see ourselves as others see us," he was suggesting that it is rare to obtain such a perspective, and desirable. I wonder now whether I should regret rejecting that first image. Whether the artist's first choice was, after all, that truer vision, the one that should have made me say: "That's amazing - you're amazing! That's astonishing - you're astonishing! Townies welcomes submissions at townies@nytimes.com. Diana Treviño Benet is a writer.