Graduating high school was really emotional for me. I'd obviously made a huge thing out of what that experience was for me, and saying goodbye to it was very weird. So I had to be like, boom, onward and upward.
When I wrote my blog and went to fashion week, I got a lot of shade from older editors about paying my dues and educating myself. I get where they were coming from, but it's also weird now to see their institutions scramble to use the internet in a way that's not savvy, but genuinely effective and exciting to people. I've been doing that for years.
Some of my clothes are things that we'd play dress up with when we were little, and it's funny that now I'm wearing it like as an everyday thing. But if I say 'vintage' or 'thrifted' on the blog, there's this community of fashion bloggers and I've become sort of tight with some of them, and we like just send each other packages. If I'm thrifting and I find this great dress but it won't fit me and I won't grow into it because I'm impossibly tiny, I don't want to let it sit there. I'll buy it and send it to a friend.
I've never really felt like a journalist. I've felt like a writer and a diarist. I have made myself vulnerable in my writing, and I think that vulnerability makes people strong. My favorite performances or works of art are always people showing that side of themselves.
I love art, but I don't think I'm especially good at it. Fashion I think I could imagine, but I'm not really sure. I think it's easiest for me to picture myself in music.
I don't think I was ever thinking critically about my aesthetic, I think it's enough when you're little just to understand that you can give yourself the permission to try and see things differently or create something original, even though you probably won't make anything original for a really long time.
I see so few scripts just because, for whatever reason, there just aren't that many good scripts with a young, teenaged girl. So it's always been sporadic. People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.
I think it's really hard to find a good women's magazine, and I like that Glamour is way more about what you want and not what your man wants. I don't really know what it's like to be a woman yet, so I wouldn't have too much insight, but I guess it would be a bit interesting to have more of that granny style in there. Because I think it should be easier for women to feel like they don't have to be conventionally attractive or think of flattering clothing before they think of fun clothing.
I do think reading is the best practice for writing, along with writing all the time. I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.
"Girly" can be limiting if you're told it's the only option. I don't think the solution is to get rid of the girly stuff or decide it's oppressive and get mad at a singer or book for not ACCURATELY REPRESENTING ALL WOMEN. There just needs to be more options for girls who don't identify with the girly aesthetic, and can broaden the idea of what being a girl means. Similarly, there needs to be more of that stuff that can be aesthetically girly, but feminist in the actual message.
I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything "girly" with vanity or stupidity. I also think it takes away from girls' agency to say that girls who are interested in that kind of thing only are because they don't know what's good for them.
The Internet, really. It's amazing what you can find. There are so many different resources on the Internet and I got into blogging because of my friend's sister who had a blog, Fashion Robot, which she stopped a few months ago just because it was too much time ... I started taking more of an interest in fashion, and going to more websites like Style.com or whatever. Eventually I made a hasty decision and made my own.
I have a lot of love for the resilience personified in so many achievements made by Americans. I feel not American when that idea of resilience is appropriated to justify discrimination, e.g., "Make America Great Again."
To me, being a woman in 2016 is allowing myself to contain multitudes. Looking at who's given the space to do so and why.
I always joke that I'd like to be a cat 'cause then I'll have nine lives, and then I can do like everything. But that's really hard.
There are things that feel so small but are such a big part of life.
I don't really read that much stuff about myself anyways, because I feel as though you then develop this mind-set of just making sure other people would approve of your decisions.
Sometimes people are so unbelievably vitriolic on the Internet because I think that everybody wants to be heard, and the easiest way to be the loudest is to be the hater. But you don't know who's behind the keyboard, and you don't really know if their complaint is about the topic at hand or if they're just bitter about something else.
I did community theater and kids programs at professional theaters and plays at school and voice lessons for seven years. I stopped because it was so time-consuming. But then I realized that I had access to this world where I could go on auditions. And there wasn't too much of an identity crisis when I started acting professionally because I had been acting longer than I had been writing. It didn't feel new.
I think it'd be great to own a fun concept store with my friends and just sell books and records.
I'm not obsessively a follower of fashion in the way I used to be. But I still have all those magazines I bought at the time because I bought ones that felt a little timeless, more like books.
I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to take the basics.
I think it was my mom's attitude about art and being part of the narcissistic digital generation or whatever that made me think anyone would care what I had to say about anything!
We all have the people we follow on Tumblr whose opinions or taste we respect. And I think because you see so much more variety of opinions and everything on the internet, it's less decided that something is good or bad. It's more like we all just sort of like what we like.
I try to be very honest in my writing. It's amazing, though, to think that people are responding to what we do, but it's okay if they're responding in a positive way too, because I think just creating anything at all to put out there is a gift.
