Read More

Looking to lose your faith in humanity?

Go to the internet, young wanderer. Seek, and you shall find. You shall find the dark bits of people’s hearts and the sharp stones they wouldn’t dare throw in public. You shall find the endless reel of news headlines whose words dig like elbows into the paranoia side of your composure and leave you gasping.

It’s all there.

As a shining example, I crossed paths with an article that blew my mind this last week. The article was a compilation of revealed fashion industry secrets from dethroned VOGUE Australia editor,  Kirstie Clements. When Clements lost her job, she took the opportunity to speak out against the atrocities she witnessed during her time at VOGUE. 

 

The article describes the difference between being ‘skinny’ and being ‘Paris Thin’. And the difference is everything. Skinny is out, people. Paris thin is in.

 And how do we achieve such greatness?

By eating Kleenex and spending a couple hours each day on an intravenous drip.

“…on another shoot I was chatting to one of the top Australian models during lunch. She had just moved to Paris and was sharing a small apartment with another model. I asked her how that was working out. "I get a lot of time by myself actually," she said, picking at her salad. "My flatmate is a 'fit model', so she's in hospital on a drip a lot of the time."*

“In 2004, a fashion season in which the girls were expected to be particularly bone-thin, I was having lunch in New York with a top agent who confidentially expressed her concern to me, as she did not want to be the one to expose the conspiracy. "It's getting very serious," she said…"The top casting directors are demanding that they be thinner and thinner. I've got four girls in hospital. And a couple of the others have resorted to eating tissues. Apparently they swell up and fill  your stomach."*

I really wish I could say this was a hoax. An urban legend made up to make girls appreciate themselves the way they are. But this is true. This what is increasingly even more terrifying is that this is an ENCOURAGED form of beauty that is sold to us as normality. The way we should be, should we want to look right in the right clothing.

I’m over it. I’m over being hit in the head with a bludgeon of fabricated reality.

And due to this, I’ve started to Read More.

Read More doesn’t necessarily mean books, it means to be in focus. To write your own story. To be in the here and now, enjoying the things you love, the things you TRULY love. Because putting my focus on an unattainable, empty goal made being happy a lot less attainable for a while there.

If those same people who sell us air-brushed victims of starvation try to make us think we need to be faceless cookie-cutter copies, we’re going to have to realize that what’s underneath is a lot harder to photo-shop away. 

It's there to stay. And it’s there for good.

And like a good book, it’s what they’ll remember you by, long after you leave.

Love,

Chloe

*All quotes are from a news article on Clement's experiences that can be found through this link: http://www.ibtimes.com/vogue-editor-says-models-think-its-ok-faint-food-deprivation-eat-tissues-go-hospital-drips-be-paris

Afterglow

Resisting the temptation to do something I'll regret is something I haven't perfected yet.

The result of this lack of control is quite simple: I pay for it each and every time.

I wish I could say I took it all in stride. That I was the bigger person, and walked away with my dignity and heart intact. But then I'd just be another liar with my pants on fire hanging by a telephone wire.

I was not brave. I whined about the world and how it had turned against me. I cried on every pillow I owned. I stood in the mirror so I could see the mascara tracks caused by the deplorable wreck that was my life (I'm really not proud of that one). I shook my fist at the ceiling and told God He wasn't real.

And in response, He kept loving me the way He had been loving me since time began.

I was handed warmth when I lost myself in the winter of my sorrow. I was given light for the shadows I had gathered for myself.

That light was aggravating. How dare there be happiness while I was trying to think about everything that truly sucked about this world?

  

Down in my dark dark room, in my dark dark heart, there was a sunny cheerful ray of sunshine that knocked relentlessly at the door of my unhappiness.

I opened the door just a bit, out of curiosity, to see why an unstoppable force such as the Creator of the Universe would be interested in visiting my kingdom of self-pity. 

Bit by bit, I'm tearing that castle down. And bit by bit, I'm putting the grudges away.

Turns out, it's a lot easier to walk when you let things go.

And it's a lot easier to see with the lights on.

Love,

Chloe