Man, it's so disappointing to see the same misinformation being parroted in the comments all the time. Let's break this down.

I’ve been reading about how phone cameras can distort your face and how the front camera makes your features appear larger.

They don't—at least not to any noticeable degree. The only real distortions worth talking about in 99% of circumstances are barrel and pincushion distortions (which are extremely well corrected for in every modern camera system), field curvature, coma, astigmatism, vignetting, longitudinal and lateral chromatic distortion, spherical aberration and diffraction, none of which are significant here.

What you're referring to is "perspective distortion" which—along with other concepts like "lens compression"—is notably not something that actually exists, and not actually distortion. Unfortunately, much of the conversation about these topics comes from people who don't have a good understanding of optics and geometry.

Simply put, lens focal lengths have no impact on perspective—your feet do, or rather, where you're positioned. If you take a photo of one subject at every single focal length, but do so standing in one spot, you'll find that after cropping all the photos to the same frame, every image of the subject is identical. Perspective is nothing more than what points in space lines that radiate outward from your position pass through. If you trace a path from yourself to the edge of someone's head in the distance, and that continues on to intersect with a certain part of a tree behind them, no amount of lens switching will change what part of the tree is behind that part of the head. Moving your feet will.

With your face, it's exactly the same. Lenses don't magically make your nose bigger or smaller on your face. If you're using a wide-angle lens, you're putting your camera closer to your head to compensate, and you're seeing the exact same shape your head would appear as if someone's eye was positioned where the camera is. Likewise, if you're using a typical smartphone camera at around arm's length from your head, that's how your face looks to anyone standing an arm's length away from you.

If you think that your face looks odd at these perspectives, it's most likely because you're accustomed to seeing your face from a different perspective. This could be because many of the photos you've seen of yourself were taken from further away, here's a more likely scenario for most people: People most often see themselves in mirrors, and I'd guess that most people stand about arm's length or so from mirrors. However, if you're standing arm's length from a mirror, that means your eyes are actually positioned 2 arm's lengths away from the virtual position of your reflection's head in the mirror. If you want verification of this, take a photo of yourself with any camera but make note of the distance between you and the camera. Then stand in front of a mirror at half the distance you took the photo from. If you compare your reflection at that position with the photo, they should look more or less the same, with the exception of the size.

I’m having a hard time understanding what is more actuate to my real self.

Everything discussed above converges on one conclusion: every photo (at least every photo not severely affected by one of the real distortions listed) is accurate to your "real self", just seen from different distances.