It’s the fin de siecle—and fin de this sick outfit. This will be the last time I ever wear this dress. It’s from the 1920s. Over 100 years old. It’s silk and velvet brocade with tassels and a fur-lined skirt. It’s the most exquisite dress I’ve ever owned. And I’ve owned a lot of exquisite dresses.
But the seams rip every time I move. I kept painstakingly sewing it back together. The last time I wore it (before this last, last time photoshoot), I hand-sewed it for a half hour before going to Story Story Late-Night’s “A HOLiDAY NOT TO BE REMEMBERED.” It was a powerful show. The stories were riveting in the way that makes you put one hand on your heart and one hand in the air to feel the palpable electric buzz of the collective human experience of raw, real storytelling. I’m glad that this was the last event it will ever go to. I will not forget it.
But sometimes, beautiful things cannot be resurrected. Because they are simply done here.
Seven years ago, I had an ego death of sorts. Tho painful, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I learned the hard way the vital lessons I desperately needed to learn before I could ever become the person I truely want to be.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like that line from Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do: “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh! She’s dead!”
The old Jessica is dead. She was lovely and weird and porous and fragile and low self-esteemed and always seeking ways to escape. She had zero healthy boundaries. I both hated and adored living inside of her. She loathed herself a lot. She was miserable too often. She projected all the time. Only her fantasy life and ungrounded idealism kept her alive and lit.
But as Cheryl Strayed once said to an aspiring writer: “You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.”
This bitch no longer lives in fantasy. She spent seven years in a cocoon. As goo. Trying to figure out what is real and what is not real about herself and her dreams and her perception. Finally, she has emerged. A butterfly. Still delicate but fierce as fuck. She is free and she is responsible. She lives in clear-eyed vision and inspired daily action. She is far kinder to me. She is deep-down content. She is pretty fly. I can’t wait to see where her new wings take her.
I assume I got this unlabeled antique dress from In Retrospect like 10 years ago but I can’t really remember that or the price | Frye boots with brown antique leather – $200, TheFryeCompany.com
Cheep it like a metamorphosis.
Cheep 