Sometimes, or, if I’m being honest, ALL OF THE TIME, I spend more time than I should thinking about what I should wear to a thing. I place a lot of value on outside appearances and neglect the interior. It trickles down even to my idea of what clean is. If a kitchen LOOKS clean, it is clean. No dishes in the sink but like quiet, secret pools of old chicken juice pushed under the dishwasher. A while back, I found this letter in a box of things at my parents’ house. I wrote it to Seventeen Magazine when I was 13 or so, for a ‘tell us why you need a Makeover’ type contest.

It is so sad and horrifying that I guess it’s also a little bit funny, but I keep it a picture of it saved on my desktop to remind myself that there’s some part of me that, for whatever reason, was trapped in this shallow loop at a young age, and that now I am an adult, and I can step out of this loop and just be a person who just wears the same thing every day, a uniform over her thoughts.