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“Self love isn’t limited to yoga and green tea. It isn’t an aesthetic. It isn’t a commodity. It is tedious work, only your hands can make.”

— Donte Collins

May-be Baby

Listen to this.

Doesn't it make you want to go back to high school and have another summer love affair?

Watch this.

She is me. Except also like a supermodel or whatever.

Make this.

My favorite piece in my house is a big abstract painting on fabric.

Wear this.

Or just fantasize about wearing it once you make all your dream $$$. Wear this in the meantime.

Go to this.

LA friends, I obviously got extra tickets, let's go.

53

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Pretty by Katie Makkai

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, “What will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? What comes next? Oh right, will I be rich?” Which is almost pretty depending on where you shop. And the pretty question infects from conception, passing blood and breath into cells. The word hangs from our mothers' hearts in a shrill fluorescent floodlight of worry.

“Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?” But puberty left me this funhouse mirror dryad: teeth set at science fiction angles, crooked nose, face donkey-long and pox-marked where the hormones went finger-painting. My poor mother.

“How could this happen? You'll have porcelain skin as soon as we can see a dermatologist. You sucked your thumb. That's why your teeth look like that! You were hit in the face with a Frisbee when you were 6. Otherwise your nose would have been just fine!

“Don't worry. We'll get it fixed!” She would say, grasping my face, twisting it this way and that, as if it were a cabbage she might buy.

But this is not about her. Not her fault. She, too, was raised to believe the greatest asset she could bestow upon her awkward little girl was a marketable facade. By 16, I was pickled with ointments, medications, peroxides. Teeth corralled into steel prongs. Laying in a hospital bed, face packed with gauze, cushioning the brand new nose the surgeon had carved.

Belly gorged on 2 pints of my blood I had swallowed under anesthesia, and every convulsive twist of my gut like my body screaming at me from the inside out, “What did you let them do to you!”

All the while this never-ending chorus droning on and on, like the IV needle dripping liquid beauty into my blood. “Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? Like my mother, unwrapping the gift wrap to reveal the bouquet of daughter her $10,000 bought her? Pretty? Pretty.”

And now, I have not seen my own face for 10 years. I have not seen my own face in 10 years, but this is not about me.

This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in. About women who will prowl 30 stores in 6 malls to find the right cocktail dress, but haven't a clue where to find fulfillment or how wear joy, wandering through life shackled to a shopping bag, beneath those 2 pretty syllables.

About men wallowing on bar stools, drearily practicing attraction and everyone who will drift home tonight, crest-fallen because not enough strangers found you suitably fuckable.

This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters.

“You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely 'pretty'.”

XLVII

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”

— Twyla Tharp

10 Of My Favorite Instagram Accounts

Aureta

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Watts.on

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TrustMeDaddy - Screenshots to showcase her incredible captions

ManRepeller

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Green.Couch

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Amberasaly

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DecorHardcore

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Nadia Aboulhosn

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Davis Ayer

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Marz Leon

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XXI

“The path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.”

— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

I am spitting out your name in the back of my bedroom.
I am six cups of coffees in, but that’s besides the point.
I am figuring out which parts of my personality are mine
and which ones I created to please you.

I am still holding onto some of the letters you wrote me.
I tell myself it’s to remember.
I tell myself it’s because I am afraid of forgetting
the early warning signs.
I tell myself I’m not sentimental.

I’m not sentimental.
I’m just afraid of throwing every burning thought
I have about you into the trash
and starting a wildfire.

Thinking about you takes effort now.
These days, if I want to bleed you out,
I have to grab a knife.

This is a form of self-abuse.
This is a form of reliving my youth.
This is a way to remember what it felt like to be near you.

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