#10YearChallenge Winter 2012 VS NOW! #DeGenderFashion
The photos on the left were taken when I was a junior in college. I had a fashion blog & would ask my friends to take photos of my looks on the way to class. I’d name each one after books or ideas I was reading like “CRUEL OPTIMISM” or “REJECT THE GENDER DICHOTOMY” (I’ve been on this kick for a while !!)
Style was one of my first forms of creative self-expression, a practice of self-fashioning into the person I wanted to be. When I was leaving Texas for first year of college my mom & I got into a huge fight. “You can’t wear clothes like that, no one will take you seriously!”
18 year old me shouting “I don’t care,” was a form of care for 30 year old me. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew where I didn’t want to be anymore: fear.
When I look at these photos together I don’t see a “before” or “after,” I see a continuum. I see myself laying the groundwork for myself — experimenting with freedom, making the perennial choice to choose love over fear.
This is why I like New Years so much: it’s a moment of reckoning where we can reflect on all the ways we have shifted, the ways we are always becoming. Nothing is fixed. Transformation is one of the only constants. Like the seasons, and the years, we change.
I have lived so many lives in this one. I went from hating myself to accepting myself, hop-scotched across LGBTQA until I landed here: me.
How did I get here? All the people taking these photos. The people who believed in me before I could believe in myself. All the people who came to my coffee shop poetry readings and said, “Keep it up.”
It devastates me how we make one another one-dimensional: reduce people to something they once were. I believe in complexity, redemption, renewal. I believe in the infinite capacity for transformation. I believe we can and have become things we could have never imagined. I believe that’s what it means to be alive: to stretch beyond the parameters of language, categories, binaries.
Happy New Year! Signed sincerely me: a person who believes in your healing journey so much. Love & need you!