Ok, I wrote this letter for Earl Earl, but it also really applies to motherhood, and this is the thing I alluded to a while ago. If you’re getting it twice, I’m sorry! But also thank you! 😬
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.
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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.”
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