Have you ever seen a fashion assistant portrayed in a movie prior to 2000? I have. I love her purple and green clothespins.
I got my haircut this week, which was immediately followed by a full existential crisis. I don’t think my hair has been this short since high school. The morning after, I woke up and didn’t recognize myself (feeling so Carrie right now). I don’t know how I should get dressed. I feel totally different, but everyone is telling me they barely notice.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the girl who would go straight to front-facing cam and share way too much personal information on Instagram stories. This was only a year before I moved to LA; I was dreadful and unknowingly depressed. I was very underweight and thought people would like me more if I was thin. I know this isn’t a novel thought— a lot of women (and men) think this way. I loved being reckless with men (namely one) during this time and I lost a lot of my friends in continuing a relationship with him.
New York slowly started slipping away from me. I already had my sights set on Los Angeles and felt like I was dragging my time out in New York by being destructive. I would have done anything for men including (as I've previously mentioned running down the street in a downpour) posting half-naked photos on my Instagram stories (not that crazy).
The first birthday I celebrated in LA was one day after my grandfather passed away, and almost three months to the exact date that my grandmother, his wife, passed. I was such a disaster that my shrink told me to count how many people wished me a happy birthday because I was convinced that no one cared about me. I counted 63 people and wrote all their names down. Somewhere I have that journal.Even with those 63 names, I was still so depressed that I started having crying spells. What do you expect? I had just found out my ex-boyfriend was dating the vice president’s stepdaughter by reading the Daily Mail!
It was the ultimate rejection. Amid Covid, I didn’t have a community to turn to. I missed my friends in New York but felt guilty about how reckless I had been with the most important friendships in my life the year prior. Shutting out my closest girlfriends, (all I had ever wanted in my life) for a fraught relationship with someone willing to cheat on me and let me know over text on Christmas.
That March, my roommate listened to me weep across the hall with her bedroom door shut. One day in April, I was potting a plant and walked into the kitchen, my hands and fingernails crusted with soil. She emerged from her room that connected to the kitchen and went to the water filter on the refrigerator, a behavior that made the conversation feel less serious. You know it’s ok to ask for help she said, or something to that nature. I don’t remember exactly because everything was muffled, and still is even now, remembering us standing in that kitchen with the brown marble countertops. The fruit bowl on the windowsill still staring at us. I was desperate to be helped, I thought I wanted to stop being so miserable, but looking back now I wondered if that was my most comfortable state. If I had wanted to be that miserable so someone would ask if I needed help. Maybe all I ever needed was someone to ask.
I had moved to the land of Too Much Time On Your Hands: Los Angeles. Everyone here wears athleisure and goes to the mall. People are comfortable staying in their homes, pandemic or not. I make plans with my girlfriends a week out, and I don’t mind it. However, I do miss the spontaneity of New York. People in New York must have fewer boundaries? I can text my friend that I’m on their street and they will come down and pick me up and carry me into their apartment. Finding that familiarity in Los Angeles was difficult.
I was unemployed for the first 8 months. Then I finally got this thing called a job.
The fashion industry: a great place to work if you have low self-esteem.
Late last year in Northern California, I told a woman, Dawn, almost 40 years my senior what I do for work, I work as a wardrobe assistant, and she replied, What is that? I found myself asking the same thing. The small town of Albion was silent. Population 222 persons. The first morning was wet from the light rain the night before. At breakfast over cinnamon raisin toast and strawberries, Devon (my former roommate who I mentioned earlier) and I marveled at the fact that you couldn’t hear anything for miles. You couldn’t hear cars or trucks. You couldn’t hear dogs barking or music from your neighbor’s garage or piano or planes or helicopters. When was the last time we couldn’t hear a road? she said. The only sound in earshot was the quietness of the redwood trees.
While I stood in Dawn’s garden, I felt a calmness I never had before, while simultaneously questioning what I was doing with my life back in Los Angeles. Walking around slowly, I approached a blackberry bush and gathered a handful. We watched Dawn as she pulled her entire kale flower out from the root in her greenhouse. A life like hers seemed so simple, so mundane.
It was all I wanted.
I started working out with a trainer, so now I definitely can’t afford an Eres swimsuit. Lucky for me
laura reilly
published an entire swimwear edit yesterday. Summer is a dreaded season for dressing if you’ve previously had an eating disorder. I am a winter/fall person. I hate my legs so I don’t wear shorts unless they go almost below the knee. I think I have cankles because once in college I said to my friend (?) “Do I have cankles?” and she said “Maybe a little” and now that’s seared into my brain. (It’s reminiscent of when I was in 1st grade gym class and I told the girl next to me that I wouldn’t tell on her if she bit my finger, so she did it, and I told on her.) Fall and winter are full of luxurious long coats and wool trousers. Scarves and fur mittens. Summer is just…bathing suits? Sarongs…?
While we’re on the topic of eating, I made Clare de Boer’s Blueberry Spoon Cake as soon as it hit NYT Cooking. I’m going to make this next.
I made chocolate chip cookies, too. Baking is one of the cures for depression. I’ve been doing it since I was 11 years old. I got the gene from my grandmother, the one I mentioned earlier.
Streams of consciousness from my week:
Why is the only place to dance in LA at a club or your own car?
Are men in New York OK? My friend went on a date this week at Fanelli’s and they split the bill…? At…Fanelli’s? I told her to run.
You have to be seriously deranged to back into a parking spot. I don’t think I’ve ever done this. It takes far too long and way too much effort. Just pull in like a normal person? Sorry that this is a very LA thought, but I am driving most of my day. Last week I went to three grocery stores in one day.
If you’re like me, you’ll book a trip to Europe and then realize your passport is expired. I spent all of Friday evening (classic— stores about to close, government offices definitely closed) doing panic research about how to expedite a passport. I filled out all applications including the DS-82 which I sent out first thing on Saturday morning, priority airmail to Pennsylvania, only to have forgotten to send my old passport with it (idiot). Now I have a fancy appointment in person at the passport agency in Westwood (awful place).
I put on a jazz playlist, but Leonard Cohen came on instead. Leonard Cohen is watching over me, making me write this. He’s taking control of my fingers.
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