You Don't Have To Ruin Your Life To Repair It

And the real reason my skin has been looking so great.

Ok, this letter really doesn’t have anything to do with fashion & personal style, but it does have to do with identity…AND it’s my newsletter! Everything that I write about springs out of my own brain, and whatever is in my brain is what comes out. This week, this is what bubbled out. 😬

I’ve been through many, many phases in my life. I kind of touched on some in this recent post about the worst outfits of my life, but it was really just a tiny glimpse at my past, at a time when I was feeling introspective. 

When I started this newsletter, I was in the depths of Covid, March 2021, feeling super isolated, and wanting to think about my own and the collective ~our~ identity. At its best, fashion and personal style communicates something intensely personal and interior. It’s one way to signal certain values or aspects of someone’s core them-ness. In my life, I’ve really used clothing in that way. Experimenting with varying degrees of success, always with self-discovery in mind. While a lot of that experimentation and peacocking was for my own pleasure, I was also playing with how I wanted to be seen by others. I didn’t really have a solid idea of who or what “Laurel” was until relatively recently. I used this phrase in my first ever newsletter, and I think it fits here too: my core essence was like a fleck of dust in bathwater - I could scoop and scoop but never quite grasp it. 

My core essence. Via

I dressed and hoped to be judged favorably, so that I might see myself favorably. I was so used to that scrutiny that when I finally came into a room where truly nobody assumed anything about me, the experience was astounding. 

I’m being vague because I am so used to being judged, and it scares me to talk so openly about something kind of ugly. For the first time in my life, I felt fully embraced, accepted, understood, all the good things, without having to even open my mouth. I was in the company of other women with whom I shared so much, but about whom I knew nothing, and I felt free to talk about the most awful moments of my life, cry my guts out, and have someone hold my hand and tell me, “Welcome home.”