The specific, daily, slightly irrational practice of deciding that what's in front of me is worth paying attention to. July is doing a lot right now. Here's how it's going so far.

1. Decaf iced coffee. Unfortunately for me, I can only have caffeine in small and infrequent doses. I often make iced coffee, but when I’m feeling lazy I reach for Stok Decaf Cold Brew.

2. MAC lipstick in Marrakesh. A delightful and intense orange brown that has no business being this good in July but here we are. Technically an autumn shade. I wore it for five days in a row. It makes me feel like some kind of vamp.

3. Oysho, discovered while traveling. Technically owned by Inditex (sigh, I know, I know), Oysho is the European athleisure brand I didn't know I needed. The leggings are genuinely good, the lounge pieces look expensive, and it fills a gap between “I give up” and “I spent how much on activewear.” I also scored a purple iridescent rain jacket for 23 euros. Need I say more?

4. Rereading Richie Hofmann's Second Empire. My new favorite poet. His poems feel like waking up in a room I’ve never been in but somehow already know. Reading, preferably in the late afternoon when the light slowly turning orange before aperitivo hour.

5. Essie T Bill's Putty, tracked down and rediscovered. I wore this shade all of the time in college and grad school and fell into the vortex of discontinuation. I’ve been hunting for it on eBay periodically. It’s chalky, exactly the color of putty, and obviously, perfect. I snagged two bottle for nostalgia’s sake. It’s a little streakier than I remembered (polish thinner will do that) but I love just the same.

6. Doing my nails as a morning meditation. I take medication that requires an empty stomach and at least an hour before eating, which means I have a built-in window of enforced stillness in the am. I do my nails as a weekly (or twice-weekly) zone out. Slowly, carefully, one coat at a time. I do cheat and sip decaf.

7. Wearing all black in the heat, completely unironically. Also: a lot of navy lately, courtesy of an Oysho mix-and-match set and a printed dress I found in Rhodes that I will be wearing until it falls apart. The siren doesn't pivot to white linen just because it's July.

8. On a quest for the best olive oil body oil. I don't have a conclusion yet. I have only the quest. If you have a recommendation for something that actually absorbs, something that smells ancient rather than fresh, I’m all ears. I’m genuinely asking. (Readers: please advise in the comments.)

9. A pulp novel found in a free little library. I will not tell you the title because the cover is slightly unhinged and I love it too much to explain it. The point is: someone left it there for a reason, I took it for a reason, and now I am reading something completely outside my usual curiosities.

10. This 2006 David Lynch interview: The Idea Dictates Everything. Forty minutes of Lynch talking about where ideas come from, how to catch them, what to do when you're in the dark. I've watched it twice already.

11. Unnecessary Depop purchases, $10 or under. July acquisitions: Oysho sports bra and workout set, a vintage white satin bralette.

12. The Turkish hamman. I went. It was life-changing. I have never lived until someone has scrubbed every cell of my body in a marble room full of steam and left me feeling like I was just assembled correctly for the first time. Go. Immediately.

13. Having a notebook for a singular purpose. One is my common place, another for daily to-do’s, a third for poetry notes, and so on. I keep them all in my Louise Carmen-style journal.

14. Making one beautiful thing to eat per week. Blistered cherries with vanilla sugar and sea salt on ricotta toast. Stone fruit and burrata salads. Cold sesame noodles. I treat myself like a guest worth impressing.

15. Burning paper incense during the day. Dreamy. Poetic. Airy. It’s a little less heavy than burning a candle in 95 degree heat (I mean, I’ve done it for the mood).

16. Greece and Venice, and what water does to a person. Greece was ancient and salt-heavy and completely indifferent to you in the best possible way. Venice was something else entirely. Closer, stranger, more interior. Both involved being in or near water every day and I think this is what I actually need to function. Note to self: more water.

17. Venice is a vampire. I will not elaborate further.

18. A silver cross from the cave church in Patmos. My husband bought it. The church of Saint John the Theologian sits above a cave where John is said to have written the Book of Revelation. We bought a small silver cross there and carried it home.

19. Miroirs No. 3 on MUBI. Christian Petzold’s 2025 film stars Paula Beer as a depressed piano student who survives a car crash and is taken in by a mysterious woman in the German countryside. It is quiet and strange and slightly spell-like and I was riveted.

20. Maladaptive daydreaming but make it manifestation. I have been planning trips I may or may not take — Portugal, Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Tokyo — in enough detail that they feel half-real already. Itineraries. Neighborhoods. The specific café I would go to first. I don't know if this is productive or delusional. I suspect it is both and I suspect that is fine. Totally normal.

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Below is a living, paid-only index of the Tartufo Club universe: the exact objects, curiosities, shade names, the brands, the perfumes, the dresses, organized and searchable, updated as I write and publish.

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She’s dressed to kill and she may be slightly dangerous. She’s my favorite non-official archetype. This is a list for her. Five erotically-charged dresses for a summer that asks nothing of you except that you show up completely.

The one that is literally named after her

Di Petsa's Siren Wet Look Long Dress comes in at over $6,000 (and it’s completely out of my budget by several zeros), but isn’t it gorgeous?! It’s made-to-order and locally in Greece, naturally. The chic green hue is like poetic sea foam. Each piece is intricately draped and sewn by hand to create the ethereal illusion of water rippling across the body. May I also suggest Di Petsa’s Purity Draped mini dress? It’s a big spend, but it’s gorgeous probably the only dress I would need for the rest of the summer as the white hue and draping make it look like a effervescent sea shell.

The one that wrinkles beautifully and knows it

A white linen maxi is the oldest trick in the Mediterranean wardrobe and it works every time because it is, actually, perfect. The Staud Madison sweetheart linen maxi has all of the bells and whistles: fitted, stretched linen, a sultry neckline, supportive straps, slightly nipped waist, thick supportive straps with the kind of construction that means you can eat and sit and exist in it. This is the siren in her daytime finery. Slightly crumpled, slightly sun-warmed, and completely unbothered. Wear with chunky gold earrings, flat leather sandals, and pack a tote that has seen things. The wrinkles are not a problem, they are exactly the point. (I’m also a big fan of the linen mini in this cheeky orchid color.)

I’ve also been getting loads of wear out of my DISSH Lacy Straw Sleeves Mini Dress in Straw (and it’s on final sale for $57). It’s also 100% linen with a 100% cotton lining, which is delightful because I can actually stay cool and I’m wearing 0% synthetics.

The one for the long dinner that goes until midnight

You know that kind of dress. It’s a specific dress for the evening that starts at a table overlooking the water and ends somewhere else entirely. It’s a slip-style, it moves, and it is the color of the sea as the sky shifts into night. Perhaps not quite black, not quite navy, and something that feels moody and enchanting in candlelight. The RIXO Lysandra satin midi dress — V-neck, slip shape, ankle length, under $550 — is that dress. It is the blank slate that reads expensive because the cut does all the work. Kitten heels. A perfume that smells like you've already been somewhere. A single ring.

I also think the ARCH4 maxi dress feels like a slow song, maybe a Bossanova tune over chilled wine and al fresco connections.

The one that is technically a going-out dress but you'll wear it everywhere

The For Love & Lemons Mermaid Slip Dress — egg shell blue, babydoll hem, very short, and completely unserious about itself — is the one you wear to the beach bar, to the aperitivo, to the afternoon where nothing is planned and everything happens. Sounds like my kind of day on a European summer holiday. Pair it with woven jelly flats1 (they are back and they are perfect) and a beaded bag that jangles when you walk. The siren isn't always ancient and mythic. Sometimes she's this too, which is spirited and playful.

Also bring:

Oversized gold jewelry. The kind that makes noise when you walk. Large earrings. A single chain anklet. Sunglasses large enough to hide behind. A shell necklace, for reasons2. Your satin ballet flats3 for when the sandals become too much.

What to read:

Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated by Ann Goldstein (who also translated Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, so you’re in safe hands). A woman returns to her childhood apartment in Sicily to sort through her past, forced to confront the disappearance of her father when she was thirteen. It is a book about identity and absence and the Sicilian coast and it will make you feel exactly the right amount of haunted for a siren summer. Slip it into your bag next to the sunscreen.

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Welcome to my secret drawer. Pull up a chair. Saved Tabs is a file folder of private discoveries, ghosts that linger, and intriguing ephemera from my phone.

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She woke up at 5:15 a.m. (Watching the video at 11pm, I was already exhausted.)

And then it began.

Tongue scraped. Lemon water. Red light mask. Mouth tape removed ceremonially. Cortisol-lowering supplements. A mushroom powder that looked suspiciously like cocoa. A bevy of serums, creams, moisturizer and finally, SPF. Ten minutes of meditation. A gratitude journal with cream linen covers. Pilates. Cold brew. Green juice.

She was beautiful and yet she also looked vaguely miserable. Absent, even. Like an residual haunting performing wellness.

And I was the voyeur of it all. And suddenly it occurred to me that the wellness industry has become pornographic in contemporary culture. It’s all surface and no sensation.

Audre Lorde, in her essay Uses of the Erotic, drew a distinction between the erotic and the pornographic that feels startlingly contemporary. The pornographic, she wrote, is sensation without feeling. The imitation of depth. Essentially, it’s the most basic performance of intimacy.

Which is to say that the pornographic is not sex, and the pornography of wellness is devoid of any sense of pleasure.

It’s the woman filming her nervous system regulation routine for strangers. And that nervous system isn’t even regulated.1

Follow any account dedicated to the optimized life long enough and you’ll notice something odd. It’s the fact that everyone in running in a hamster wheel where they’re is regulating, optimizing, healing, detoxing, balancing hormones, improving sleep, lowering cortisol, fixing gut health, protecting the skin barrier, aligning with their cycle, and becoming the highest version of themselves. (But are they really?? That’s a question for the ages.)

There’s no crash out, just the juxtaposition of constant consuming and barely there progress. Nobody is spending three months devastated over a breakup and coming out the other side with terrible bangs and a new understanding of God. Nobody is lying in bed staring at the ceiling. And above all, nobody is taking to their phones and coming out and saying that wellness is doing absolutely nothing for their well-being, or peace of mind.

Instead, we’re lead to embark on a new series of quests, like for the supplement which promises connection to a youthful body you have outsourced to an algorithm.

But the catch is that there isn’t a supplement for loneliness.

The erotic, in Lorde’s sense, has very little to do with sex. Instead, it’s a delicious moment you notice your current mood. It’s eating ripe peaches over the sink. It’s choosing the red sundress with ruffles or the tiny slit because it makes you feel like a character from a secret novel you’re writing in your head. It’s reading in the bath with a drink until the water goes lukewarm. Think of it as desire without metrics or gag-inducing metrics.

Wellness has developed the vocabulary of an operations manager. It’s sterilized any form of sensuality or curiosity from its vernacular. (Honestly, how boring is that??) As a copywriter, the verbiage is so obvious.2

Optimize. Stack. Regulate. Support. Recover. Maintain. Protect.

It’s so watered down and decentered as if the human body is a data center instead of this fascinating and unique temple. It’s devoid of any sense of intuition3 or ecstasy. But, obsession is everywhere here.

Not that a single influencer or consumer will admit to it.

Look, some mornings are meant to be ruined. Nights are messy. Sometimes my mascara runs and I don’t wash my face. Call the wellness gods.

I think, in not so many eloquent words, that Lorde was writing about the future. And so the future came with free shipping and matching workout sets and it drinks protein-laced coffee. If you sign up for early access, the future gives a 20 percent off friends and family discount. The future is here for a very limited time.

And that’s what you want, isn’t it? Immunity from the chaos of being alive. Wellness is a religion for people who don't trust mystery.

The future promises a pipe dream and a vow that with enough supplements and regimens, you won’t age wrong. Instill a protocol and mitigate the grief process.

But instead, endure the terrifying, ecstatic uncertainty of being a person. Be a being with an equally gorgeous and gross interior life that cannot be quantified. Wellness, or not.

Explore siren summer this June. You’ll transform into a different sort of being with a pull of the tide.

Here’s how it begins: with attention, of course. Notice the details that make it look as if you could drag a lover under the sea at a moment’s notice. Harmonize with songs that feel like crushed iridescent shells. Swathe your skin in milky pearlescent cream blush and swipe it on your lids. Mascara the color of fresh seaweed. Nails like blue beach glass.

The designer who understands this most precisely right now is Dimitra Petsa. Her London-based label Di Petsa explores the ecofeminist relationship between women and water, combining classic dressmaking — learned from her seamstress grandmother — with her studies in performance design and her MA at Central Saint Martins. The signature Wetlook dress, made to order and entirely one-of-a-kind, was born from an investigation into female shame around the body. “I wanted to create the view of a woman who’s completely wet, but dressed,” Petsa said to W Magazine in 2021. Her past collection Mother Persephone and her Wet Script mesh pieces extend the myth further. Envision water, underworld, transformation, the sea that takes you and the dress that proves you survived it. Shop the Wetlook and Wet Script collections at dipetsa.com.

What I’m reading: Emily Wilson’s translations of The Odyssey (specifically the Sirens passage, slowly, of course) and The Iliad. Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a woman and the sea and a terrible beautiful freedom. Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts, Sicily as a place where identity dissolves and reforms. Richie Hofmann’s Second Empire, desire as gravitational pull.

What I’m watching: Portrait of a Lady on Fire — an island, a gaze, the sea as the only witness. The Lure — mythic, horror-fueled, gritty, and powerful.

What I’m wearing: White tees, scarf print skirts, dresses that conjure the goddess (see above), anything that feels equal parts gauzy, dreamy, and ethereal. Items in the color of beach glass, necklaces of polishes stones or large shells.

The beauty: a deep lip, worn for no reason nor an occasion. Salt in the hair. Smoky eyes with shades of sand and brown stone. Something that smells ancient rather than fresh. Think amber, resin, the bottom of the sea.

The siren doesn’t ask permission. Neither do you.

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The solstice arrives this week and the light is here to stay. It stretches the day past what feels reasonable and holds the heat a little longer than it should. There’s more, and more still. Golden sun. Languid afternoons. Glowy light. Warm skin. Balmy breezes.1

More color, more skin, more wanting. Summer has arrived.

I worship at the altar of summer. I’m a Persephone devotee, but I’m also an Apollo acolyte. There is a particular eroticism to this season that has nothing to do with what happens between people and everything to do with what happens inside them. The smell of sunscreen on warm skin. A dress chosen because of how it moves. Music that sounds better at night because the night is warmer. The permission June gives without explanation or apology is to desire things.

As for the Lorde quote, she may as well have been writing about summer. The power of its eroticism, its mix of desire and awareness. It's a form of attention, after all, and the refusal to be numb. It's choosing the good peach over the convenient one, the long way home over the fast one, the record you want to feel over the one that requires nothing of you.

Summer romance, at its best, is that. The heat. The electric tension before two hands intertwine. The way your own life can feel, briefly, like something worth pressing into.

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Persephone descends, Demeter grieves, the crops fail, the earth goes cold. She returns in spring and everything blooms. We use the myth as a metaphor for the seasons: underground equals winter, meadow equals summer, return equals relief. The structure is neat. It is also, I think, the less interesting reading.

It’s a typical reading.

Because here's what the myth actually tells us if you stay with it and that’s Persephone knew about the underworld while she was in the meadow. She was picking narcissus flowers — a bloom associated with both beauty and the dead, growing, significantly, at the border of the underworld — when the earth split open. She was already, in some sense, adjacent to a world of death and obsidian.

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“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” — Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic

May I speak for many of us? Often, getting dressed can feel administrative. You locate items, you put them on, you go. Rinse. Repeat.

The act is a problem solved, a body made socially legible, a box checked before the day begins. Most mornings, if we're honest, this is what it is. And sometimes it feels good to automate this process and to remove thinking entirely. (To be honest, I wear mostly all black ensembles for days when I would like to have not a single sartorial thought in my head and get on with life.)

And then there are mornings where something else happens. You reach for a perfume before you've decided why, and the scent you land on tells you something about who you’re going to be today or who you're choosing to invoke.

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On the other hand, darkness is not cold weather dependent. It’s an aura. And frankly, it’s a state of mind. The soft goth sensibility is a year-round epistemological position, and summer is, in some ways, its most interesting testing ground. The brightness makes the shadows sharper. The heat makes restraint erotic rather than merely stylistic. The season when everyone else is performing maximum availability is exactly when a certain kind of interior quiet becomes most legible, most yours.

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After all, it’s June.

This is a specific month with specific light and a specific feeling, which in my case involves a good deal of pickle juice, Italian poet hair, and the knowledge—courtesy of Susan Miller at Astrology Zone, who I have been reading faithfully since high school with dial-up internet—that on June 30th, Jupiter enters Leo for the first time since 2014. My Emerald Year begins. Nearly thirteen months of what she calls celestial favorite status1. I have waited twelve years for this. I plan to spend them well.

Here’s how I’m starting.

1. Dua Lipa’s dirty soda, made daily. Diet Coke + pickle juice + jalapeño juice + actual pickles and jalapeño slices. I have never felt more alive drinking something.

2. Rituel de Fille’s Enchanted Lip Sheer in Lilium. Okay so, I’m obsessed. It’s a neutral peach that makes my lips look like they belong to someone with a very interesting interior life. Paired with Victoria Beckham’s lip pencil in 02 for definition that holds.

3. The Serum Illuminator in Moonlit Creature, also Rituel de Fille. A radiant opal glow and just the light that comes from being the main character.

4. Richie Hofmann’s A Hundred Lovers. Rereading it slowly, which is the only correct speed. His poems feel like waking up in a room in Greece on a hot day, and then eating a bowl of wet figs with an iced espresso.

5. The Book of I by David Grieg. Read it, loved it, still thinking about it. I need more medieval novels.

6. Perfume discovery kits as daily identity play. The ritual of standing in front of your samples each morning and deciding not what you smell like, but who you are today. What role you’re playing. The whole world is a stage; and my perfume is my costume. I’ve been making my way through the Floraïku discovery set and it’s a tiny joy.

7. Cutting my hair into a long bob and waving it every morning. It takes ten minutes and makes me feel like an Italian poet in the south of France who will not be explaining herself any further.

8. Satin ballet flats. Worn everywhere. The decision to be elegant on a Tuesday. And if they get dirty, I’ll look even cooler.

9. Londontown nail concealer. Just one coat (seriously), nearly zero dry time, and suddenly my hands look like they belong to someone with their life entirely together.

10. The DIY travel journal. I Frankensteined a Louise Carmen-style journal assembled from things already in my possession: a red leather journal cover (that I thrifted for less than $13), a bunny charm from a broken Urban Outfitters necklace, a Mother Mary icon, a rose and flower charm from a Saint Theresa shrine in France, given to me by a friend years ago and finally, finally used. The things I’ve been saving for the right moment, well, this is it.

11. Unnecessary Depop purchases, $10 or under. Current acquisitions: a lace Hanky Panky off-the-shoulder top and a pair of 100% cotton Liz Claiborne mom jeans for $6. The case for cheap, specific, and completely mine.

12. Reading poetry before bed. Even just one poem. Even if I feel ridiculous and tired. Especially if I feel ridiculous.

13. One beautiful thing to eat per week. Some of my favorites include a peach and smoked feta salad, a soft-boiled egg on good bread, and a bowl of cherries with flaky salt. I prefer to treat myself like a guest worth impressing.

14. Evening walks with no destination. The literary tradition of the flâneuse, updated for my neighborhood. It gets my brain thinking when I’m stuck. Plus, it’s an excuse to listen to my favorite songs for the 100th time, too.

15. Buying flowers for myself, weekly. I’m the queen of $4.99 Trader Joe’s bouquets.

16. Burning a candle during the day. I like to mark the hours as chosen and I make candles for fun about once a year.

17. Queens of the Stone Age's Alive in the Catacombs on full loop, all the way through, every day. Also: Nine Inch Noize because romanticizing my life doesn't mean making it soft. It means making it mine. The whole album, lying on the floor, is a ritual as valid as any candle.

18. Keeping a small beauty journal. It’s not a diary, specifically: things that were beautiful today. A phrase overhead. Light on a wall. The particular way someone laughed. When my dog barks in her dreams. I catalogue three beautiful things a day.

19. The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014) revitalized my relationship with film and with storytelling. Two lovers, Cynthia and Evelyn, enact an elaborate daily ritual that slowly begins to fray at the edges. The costumes were designed by Andrea Flesch and they are—I need you to understand!!!—extraordinary. I watched it three times before it left MUBI. I would have watched it a fourth.

20. Reading my horoscope. Of course, I like believing that the cosmos conspires in my favor. Besides, astrology is literally the study of patterns. What’s not to love? And yes, I have been a Susan Miller acolyte since high school. Some things never change.

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Is it pretentious to find the erotic in the mundane? I mean, every day is all there is.

Once at a party, someone called me pretentious once in that sort of half-laughing, half-serious way that’s designed to make the recipient (aka, me) unsure whether to take offense or laugh along. I laughed and then I changed the subject.

But I thought about it for days afterward, which probably says a lot about me. It felt a little raw, as I love to lean into my preferences and things that move my spirit.

Pretentious is a word carries weight like a barb or an accusation. It’s a way to humble those who care about eros with too much conviction. It is, at its core, a social corrective.

Think of it as a way of telling someone to lower the register of their enthusiasm. It’s a form of social control, to make them want less. To be more like everyone else.

I’ve decided I’m done with that.

What pretentious actually means

The original meaning of pretentious is to pretend; trying to appear or sound more important or smarter than you are, especially in matters of art and literature. To that end, I say: who cares? If aesthetic posturing exists for social gain rather than genuine feeling, it’s none of my business.

It’s not my business if someone thrifts a well-worn Clarice Lispector book and places the book ostentatiously on a café table, or references a film to impress rather than to communicate. Did the book eventually get read? The movie eventually watched? If so, then what’s the harm?

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There was a season, not too long ago, when everything went quiet and interior and dark in the way that real difficult months entail. When the surface world continued without me and I stayed underground. I was in a strange suspended time of becoming something new.

I needed to do it, to hide away in the shadows and bloom into something else. I became something more feral and primal.

I needed to become something in touch with herself.

You probably know this season. You may be in it now.

The thing about returning from the underworld is that you never come back the same. Persephone didn’t. She returned to spring carrying the underworld inside her, and that is precisely what made her sovereign.

This is the ghost girl's secret. She haunts because she has been somewhere in the shadows.

To inhibit the underworld, is to embody. It’s a radical act, if you will. Let yourself feel the chill before rejoining spring’s air. When we make it through the underworld, we’re empowered because we did more than endure winter, we let it shape us.

And moving on, summer will be upon us soon. It’s a good time to start noticing who you are or who you want to be now that the thaw is over and the days are getting balmier.

We begin to notice beauty without guilt or suspicion because simply put, it is the bravest form of return. In my poetry chapbook hotel ghost, I wrote about bodies that reach and wait and want; I didn't know then that I was writing a map back to myself. At the time (in 2013ish), I did not think of myself a Persephone acolyte.

But I was.

Sensuality is the first sign of resurrection and you’re getting hungry for it. There’s a specific appetite. Maybe, even ravenous.

You want a specific perfume. You want to feel silk against your skin. You want to eat something slowly and taste it completely. Then you need to taste it again. It’s a persistent hunger. This is Persephone eating the pomegranate: a yes, not a trap. The body saying, “I am still here. I still want things. I am not finished.”

Sovereignty comes last, and it is the quietest of the three. It is simply the decision to move through spring on your own terms. To bloom without erasing the dark, to thrive because of the clouds and shadows.

It means to wear the depth as an accessory rather than a wound. To be someone who has been to the underworld and returned.

Ghost girl, the surface world is waiting. But you get to decide what you bring back up with you.

Who will you be as spring begins its transgression into summer heat?

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For me, fashion has long been a source of joy, an act of creation, an act of love, an art form made manifest on your body. Fashion can be a way to embody a mood, an emotion, an aesthetic, a version of yourself that day or week or year. Some years call for pink taffeta with cargo pants, some for a black suit, and some for an uneven fringe. There is nothing superficial about the act of expression. And in some ways, fashion is the ultimate act of communication: Dressing the self—for all moments in life, whether tragic, happy, or somewhere in-between.

Dressing can also bring us closer in community. While it is an act of powerful individuality, to be celebrated—it also bonds us closer together through shared joys and culture, whatever that may be. Getting your nails done or your beard trimmed is both self-care and identifying with a place and time with others. Your local salon or barber shop is more than a storefront. It’s a local place where your body and spirit are sacred.

For me, feeling good in what I wear also means being comfortable. That wasn’t always the case.

In the past, I occasionally suffered for what I thought was a good look. But now? Especially now that I’m a parent? No. It’s all about utility, as much as it is about aesthetic.

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And yes, it is possible to have both. It just requires a little creativity, which we all have in spades. It’s merely about fostering the gift we all have, and truly listening to ourselves and wearing our freak flags proudly.

I love a good retro look just like everyone else, like channeling a 1960s Ye-Ye Girl. But I also love a good, baggy jeans, big blazer, aviator sunglasses, and chunky shoe look like everyone else.

Since becoming a parent, this has only become truer. Comfort has always been king for me, reigning supreme more in the last several years when either A) I realize walking around a museum in shoes that aren’t comfortable ruin the experience and B) as long as I feel good, who cares what someone else thinks? The only thing that is my business are my own feelings and thoughts.

One thing I find refreshing about fashion? It doesn’t have to be homogenous. In a time with endless inspiration via social platforms and online magazine, it can feel simultaneously chaotic, micro niche-ified, and boringly standardized. This doesn’t have to be the case, however.

Finding your personal style, time and time again (as you evolve and change, seek a revamp, as your own needs undergo a metamorphosis) is like a much-needed check in with yourself. Some prompts that can be helpful to garner your innermost vibes:

• Where do you draw inspiration from? Think of films, paintings, music, TV shows, etc. For me, I love the ethereality of Klimt and the abstractions of Kandinski.

• What aesthetics excite you? Are you the minimalist ‘90s, the Mad Men era, ‘70s psychedelia, glam rock, sci-fi Matrix meets earthy Dune, ‘40s cherub, Sopranos-chic, or borrowing from all the above?

• Make a collage or mood board on Canva or Pinterest of your moods, favorite outfits, seasonal vibes, etc.

• Most of all, forget trends. Instead, be (all of) you. Gianni Versace wisely said, “Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way to live.”

For me, I love contradictions—and I’ve learned to embrace the messiness of loving many aesthetics, of the multitudes of moods and time-period aesthetics I admire. Sometimes, I’ve felt insecure about this, admittedly, wanting to “fit in” more—to be more polished, especially as a busy parent.

If anything, since becoming a parent, part of me felt like I need less zany and more subdued—but why? To look like I slept more? To balance out the time constraints? And to the end, what is “mom” style anyway? Maybe I want to look like Grendel’s mother instead of the easy silhouettes and neutral tones that are so popular as of late. Maybe I want to be a little chaotic and messy.

After some soul-searching, I realized I don’t want to teach my own child to be ashamed of who they are, how they choose to show up in the world, to dim their neon-bright self. I do want to teach them to be comfortable in their body, to cherish their mind and heart—and to have fun with what they wear—and most of all, to have the freedom of mind to experiment with pattern and color and fabric. Clothes are art you can wear, even if that art is comprised of sweatpants and a mishmash of chunky jewelry and big glasses. As Kenzo Takada said, “Fashion is like eating, you shouldn’t stick to the same menu.”

So, it’s back to me looking like a mess sometimes and loving it—a hodgepodge of looking like a nerdy art teacher who once worked as a 1940s librarian who stole clothes from their mom’s 1920s wardrobe who watches Buffy and sometimes listens to The Ronettes and drives around in a ‘70s van, who sometimes wears too many clashing patterns. Because why not and also who cares?

Recently, the seemingly forgotten ‘40s have whispered to me with a side of chunky, loose modern textures and lines. Think Cher meets Adrian Appiolaza. This slouchy, almost lazy vibe is the definition of contradictory when it’s also paired with the kitschy, too polished ‘50s look—but I love the comfort in it with just a touch of glam.

The combination scratches the itch for me to feel “polished” without giving up comfort when I’m playing with my 13-month-old. No one wants to feel unlike themselves—or uncomfortable when they should be focusing on what matters most—the people that make our lives richer and fuller. To making a promise between myself and my child: to show up as fully ourselves and fully comfortable.

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Busyness is a crutch. It’s a very well-dressed, socially acceptable crutch, but a crutch nonetheless. The ruse of being constantly engaged and toiling away is what many of us reach for when we can’t bear to sit with ourselves (raise you’re hand if you’re guilty of this, I know I’m not the only one).

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Under the ethos of busyness, silence feels like an accusation. Maybe even an attack. When an unscheduled hour yawns open, perhaps we panic to fill it, immediately and swiftly, with something that looks like productivity or purpose.

One of my faves, Anaïs Nin saw through it: “Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.”1 A Google Calendar does not make for the high, connective moments. They arrive, I’ve found, most often as a surprise. In a gap, completely unscheduled. Like, on a Tuesday afternoon when I have nowhere to be. Or, in a bath that ran too long with a new playlist and my notifications silenced.

The surrealists2 understood what Nin was pointing at. Their practice of objective chance, which was meant to be about wandering without destination, following the unexpected encounter, surrendering to the city's or the mind's own logic rather than imposing your own was about opening the self up to unstructured time to simply discover and allow creativity to enter in whatever form it decided to take (in the sense of an encounter, an idea arriving, etc). This practice reinforced the idea that creativity does not arrive on schedule. In fact, it comes naturally when one is available to be surprised.

Which brings me to what busyness actually is: a refusal of the interior life. And, the interior life is deeply erotic. Why avoid the erotic and all of its complexities and layers?

To me, busyness is the harbinger of depletion. We can’t create from that space or mode of existence. (But Stephanie! Yes, we can! OKAY, I hear you and I’ve certainly created while in burn out mode, but at what cost to get there?)

Instead, what if we turned ourselves towards excess? What if we created from the overflow of a life that has been given enough stillness to fill? Just some food for thought. sure, we can tap creativity while in the grind. It’s happened. Sometimes I have to. (Like when creative projects an full-time job deadlines converge, something both things happen at once, but it’s not an ideal situation for me personally.)

Creativity is best when it seeps in through the cracks of unstructured time. It arrives uninvited, during the walk we took for no reason, the morning we stayed in bed a little too long, or the evening we canceled plans and sat in the dark with a candle, a moody record, and absolutely no agenda.

That is the erotic of slowness. It’s an ordinary moment left to ripen with discovery.

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The algorithm learns all of our preferences and feeds them back to us, refined and frictionless (and now AI does it, too!). The apps smooth away the awkward silences, on purpose to keep your brain busy and “engaged” even if you’re really retaining fuck all of the content we just swiped through (and still saved, of course). The playlists never surprise us, it’s just more of what we like packaged differently but in the same font. The recommendations arrive pre-approved by a version of yourself that has been algorithmically assembled from our own behavior and handed back as aspirational identity. Everything we encounter has already been determined to be something we will like.

I realize this sounds much more bleak and dystopian that I intended. But it’s true.

And underneath all of it, a low and persistent hunger is rearing its head inside some of us or perhaps many of us.

Which brings me to Clarice Lispector, my patron saint: “I suddenly feel such a hunger for the ‘thing to really happen’ that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth” (A Breath of Life, New Directions). This is the feeling and it’s the thing to really happen, the actual encounter with something that has its own edges, its own resistance that’s wrapped in its own refusal to be comfortable. There’s a sense of friction to it all.

Friction, now there’s a buzz word. Friction is how we know we touched something real. (And not for nothing, if I had a dollar every time I heard it in a client meeting or even when I worked brand side, I’d have a lot of dollars by now.)

bell hooks understood this in the context of language itself, too: “Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.” The same is true of experience. The things worth having like the books that rearrange your soul or the intimate connections that ask something genuine of you all have friction built in. They cost something, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because they do resist forms of passive consumption.

hooks also wrote that “writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy — to stand outside — comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.” Ecstasy as friction’s reward. The standing outside yourself that only happens when something has demanded enough of you to pull you out of the ordinary.

Another polished gem comes from another one of my favorites, Octavia Butler, who described herself as "an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." She held herself in productive tension. This is what a real inner life feels like because it’s not a piece of beach glass that’s overly polished until it’s devoid of nearly all its original texture. What I also admire about this quote is that it’s not about a clean narrative of growth and arrival, it’s more of a non-linear and contradictory path (which humans walk down). We are complicated beings (isn’t that wonderful? Seriously). We’re alive because of these contrasts.

And, I think we’re starving for something that pulls and makes tension, because inevitably the journey of release is quite delicious in its own right. We’re all looking for an encounter that leaves a mark, even if it’s just psychically.

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I have been writing and reading about eros for most of my life. I just didn’t always call it that.

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Women are socialized into it early. It’s the careful calibration of appetite, of opinion, of presence. After all, it’s unbecoming to want too loudly. It’s gauche to take up too much room. Or, even worse, one shouldn’t feel too deeply or express it too freely or you will frighten people, and frightening people is the worst thing a woman can do. This is all to say that we’re taught it’s better to be smooth and pliable, because we’re easier to manage that way.

No ruffled feathers or speed bumps in the every day movement of life. It’s always better to be just the right amount.

Bullshit.

I have never been the right amount. I suspect you haven't either, or you wouldn't be here.

bell hooks said: “I am passionate about everything in my life — first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.”1 I return to this constantly because this quote feels extremely relevant today now more than ever. Passion in itself is provocation.

Clarice Lispector, in Selected Crônicas, wrote: “Life has always asked too much of me.” To which a friend replied: “But don't forget that you also ask too much of life” (New Directions). This is the condition so many women are thrust into. The woman who is too much is always asking too much of herself, of others, of the world and life at large, and of course, always in the moment. She has not moderated her expectations to fit the container she was handed. She has refused the container entirely.

Does this all come down to agency? What about power?

That being said, I’m reminded of Octavia Butler: “I began writing about power because I had so little.”2 This is the origin story of every woman who has ever been called too much. And one way or another, once you’re dubbed “too much” or even “too little,” you respond to it some kind of way. Butler’s quote is what happens when you take someone who should have been given more and watch her generate her own power.

The too-much woman is simply refusing to pretend she is less than she is. This is, I think, the most radical thing a woman can do. Simply the daily, unglamorous refusal to shrink.

Being too much is not a phase to grow out of or an inherent character flaw to correct. It is an orientation toward life that’s fully felt, and completely embodied while refusing to apologize for either.

P.S. You were never too much.

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Welcome to my secret drawer. Pull up a chair. Saved Tabs is a file folder of private discoveries, ghosts that linger, and intriguing ephemera from my phone.

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A cyberdeck, for the uninitiated: a DIY portable computer assembled from mismatched components. Think, a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, a small screen, a mechanical keyboard, a battery, and whatever enclosure the builder chooses. The term originates from William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer2, where hackers navigated digital networks on purpose-built personal devices. Forty years later, the girlies are building them in shell purses with mermaid color palettes and iridescent paint. Gibson could not have predicted this for 2026, but I think he would approve.

The timing makes complete sense if you've been paying attention. The trend comes at a moment when technology has become more controlling (oh you know, just more data harvesting, even more algorithmic surveillance, and our daily lives are inundated by ads), and cyberdecks represent a way to reclaim control, create tech democratization, and to build something that is entirely, irreducibly yours. It’s a closed system built on creative curiosity and resistance to always-on culture and the proliferation of AI-everything, AI-everywhere as of late.

But the feminine cyberdeck moment is something more specific. The people building these grew up in the Frutiger Aero era, like the the iMac G3 in Bondi Blue and Strawberry and Lime, the spy tech of Totally Spies, or the hyper-feminine maximalist gadgets of early 2000s pop culture. Those objects had personality. And they were seared into my memory. They suggested that the people making them were excited about what technology could feel like, not just what it could do. This is where Soft Club lives too, which was that late-90s/early-2000s muted urban futurism, Sneaker Pimps on the playlist (one of my teenage year faves!), lomo-filtered and slightly blurred at the edges. The cyberdeck girlies are children of both aesthetics simultaneously.

The Instagram Reels and TikTok-adjacent community is building differently from the established maker world. The form comes first. The function is designed around the aesthetic vision. Which as I said earlier, is a creative approach to tech oligarchy. It's also exactly the logic behind every piece of fashion worth discussing, especially in the wake of the 2000s trend resurgence.

Why am I drawn to this? I had a life without technology and then suddenly from age 11 on, a life filled with it (with no turning back). I went from nothing to a dial-up computer and grew up alongside tech, and inevitably, social media platforms scattered across the world wide web. I have “cool” and “hard to find” email addresses3 because I was literally given invite codes when g-mail was this new fangled thing in high school (seriously, I’m going to leave the login info in my will to my niece if I never have children). And, internet and tech culture are part of the ethos on why I wrote my poetry collection, Internet Girlfriend. Also something else you don’t know about me: I worked at littleBits4, a now-defunct tech toy company that believed in exactly this philosophy: that electronics and making were for everyone, including and especially women. We were right. We were just early.

The cyberdeck is the proof.

(More on this soon. I have a lot of saved content to share, and we’re going deeper.)5

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