18/02/2022
Everyone who loves me knows I heal my grief, my anxiety, my depression with a creative outlet. During my slow season, that creative outlet was rebranding myself, separate from my married name and as myself- a designer, a reader, and a writer. Iāve been in college for years now. And will I ever leave? Ha. Elle would never leave college.
This shoot was inspired by the piece āYou Should Date An Illiterate Girlā by Charles Warnke
Thanks team for this. You gave me far more than you know.
āLet the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didnāt read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives.
Donāt date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the cafĆ©, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.ā