Unpause

Writing is hard. Actually it’s not hard so much as it’s scary. I haven’t been vulnerable in such a long time. At least not in the way I used to be.

In graduate school I wrote freely about my medical trauma, my sex life, my opinions. But it was only to a small workshop room of other writers and a professor. Now here I am on a platform that could be viewed by anyone. The fear of being judged, of my writing not being perceived as good enough, it’s terrifying. All of the Substacks I’ve been reading are eloquently written, thematic pieces. Pieces that speak to the many. My writing is memoir. It lacks structure. I don’t write in full sentences. It’s about my life. I worry that it’s too niche.

I like perfume, matcha, a moody playlist, but I’ve always written about the real shit. I mean the darkest parts. The painful parts. And maybe that’s because the last time I was really writing I was in real pain. Like body splitting physical and mental pain. So maybe some of my writing will be softer now. More mundane. And maybe that’s scary too. I don’t want to be boring. And I’m scared I’ve slipped in being boring somewhere along the way. Once I stopped partying like it was my job and sprinting through men like a track star—I’m laughing at myself—I found so much peace. And listen it hasn’t been perfect. Not the curated life I project on Instagram. Mainly because my body is half paralyzed and it takes a lot of care every single day. But it’s been good. Like really good a lot of the time. And because it’s been really good I’ve felt guiltily sharing or even dwelling on the harder moments. Moments like realizing my dream career is far from perfect. Like opening myself up to community, and finding so much beauty in it, but also finding myself in a lot of uncomfortable situations. Moments that are still so much easier than the trauma of my past.

For a while, when my modeling career was on a very high high, I once thought, how am I going to grow? How can I grow in such a perfectly kept garden? But it wasn’t perfectly kept. I was ignoring the weeds. The ableism of the fashion industry. The quiet ways the past sneaks into my dreams most nights. I also hadn’t really let myself feel the bad in years. I hadn’t let myself experience real emotional release because a) I felt the need to be sitting in gratitude at all times and b) I shut myself off from the past. To me the past was bad and the present was good. Living in New York, modeling, married to an amazing man, surrounded by friends. I wasn’t in and out of the hospital, healing broken bones, screaming fighting with partners, blacking out, stuck in a town I wanted so desperately to leave.

For a long time I’ve feared writing about the past again because I haven’t wanted to feel it. And I didn’t want to write about the present because to me memoir writing is true and real and that means acknowledging that the present isn’t perfect. I still feel a lot of this, about the dichotomy of my past and present, about saying the wrong thing, but I know that a curated highlight reel of my life is not the only way I can show up in the world and online. I also know that I don’t only have to write about trauma anymore. The everyday, the good, I can write about those moments too. So here I am showing up in a very different way at a time when I don’t want my humanness to slip away.