The Glow Down
I don’t feel hot right now, but I also don’t feel like it’s the end of the world to not be hot all the time.
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Content Warning: This post contains very mild references to weight, mental health, and drugs, but not at all in a negative way. Just letting you know in case that’s not your bag!
I rarely, with a few notable exceptions, write anything explicitly personal on this blog/newsletter/whateveritis, for three main reasons: one, I was (relatively) extremely visible online for a year in my late teens due to what I can only explain as some trickster god playing a meme-based joke on me and completely nuked my entire online presence for a few years after that on the basis of my awareness of my own overexposure; two, this is a fashion blog, and you come here to read about clothes, ostensibly, and I want to respect that; and three, the only thing I feel comfortable speaking on publicly with any trace of an authoritative voice is style, lest I fall into the precipice that claimed the publication whose name I rudely cribbed for this very blog—once you start edging out of the bounds of the world of clothing, there are, reasonably, expectations placed on your work to deliver politically and philosophically salient insights, which god knows I could never claim to be a generator of.
That being said, clothes are so physically intimate, so definitive of one’s corporeal and social experience in the world, that on occasion, I feel the urge to share a few details about my experience in my own body, and therefore my mind, always trying to relate it back to the relationship I have with fashion.
A year and a half ago, I sat topless in the apartment of a 33-year-old man who had no desire to date me (which was all right, I literally had to FORCE HIM to change his bedsheets, apparently for the first time in months), and he took a round of film photos—he’s an okay photographer, apparently good enough to make some sort of half-baked living off of it. I looked at myself in a mirror and laughed a little, semi-hysterically, and when he asked why, I said “I think this is the hottest I’ll ever be.”