Four years ago I started a blog. I was totally unprepared for what would happen next. It seemed like such an unassuming act but in retrospect, it has been like a volcano erupting, and forming totally new land all over my life. Some of it has been lush and green and such a blessing. Other areas are charred black and I shudder at what permanent damage I may have done.
Let’s start with the green land first. It’s a lot of things that fall under the world’s definition of “success”: a healthy salary, more than a million readers, recurring segments on national and local TV, traveling across the country for speaking engagements and events, appearing in print and video spots for companies, winning blogging awards and contests. Not everyone’s definition of success of course (definitely not my own), but from the outside looking in, it certainly looks, smells and acts like success and checks some important boxes like being able to pay my rent.
I feel successful, but in a different way. Success is finding my life’s passion. It has been a total transformation spiritually and creatively and has unlocked so much passion and joy. One of my favorite quotes by Steven Pressfield in The War of Art says “of any activity ask yourself - would I do this is if I were the last person on earth?” And I can respond with a resounding “YES!” that I would be doing the exact same thing, in my room (or looting department stores haha!), and creating outfits and mixing colors all day long. The joy is there no matter if anyone is watching or not, and that has been the “success” that has kept J’s Everyday Fashion going more than anything else.
While it certainly doesn’t need to be shared in order to be successful, part of the journey has, of course, included sharing that joy. It’s why so many people blog; the human experience and sharing our ideas and experiences is so powerful. I have also always wanted to spread a message of encouragement with this blog: that being on a budget, not being the most amazing style whiz ever and having things like wrinkles and stains (aka not being perfect!) do NOT exclude you from enjoying fashion. I hoped that message would encourage women, like little beams of light in a fashion world cluttered with perfect, expensive images heavily Photoshopped, because I never felt welcome in the fashion world myself.
Now for the dark parts. Trying and failing at something has never scared me because I think failure is such a healthy part of any creative process. But there are elements of success that are incredibly hard for me. I came into blogging naïve and what blogging has exposed me to was a shock to my system and I crumbled. I have lost hours, days and weeks to being entirely crippled with pain, curled up in the dark. I faced hospitalization twice. I struggled endlessly to focus on the positive. Specifically, it was these four hurts:
1. Privacy. Being “successful” often puts you in the limelight and by being in the limelight, you completely forfeit your right to privacy in our society. Nothing is off limits. You may choose to express yourself by appearing in movies, singing, or blogging about your fashion ideas, and that gives the public license to talk about your private life and make judgments about your appearance, love life, personality, body, clothing choices, etc. Everyone is entitled to their “opinion” because you put yourself in the crosshairs. (Which makes about as much sense as saying it’s my right to run someone over because they chose to cross the street; it completely overlooks personal responsibility on the part of the driver. I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.)
I could’ve never imagined what this would feel like until it happened to me. I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me that being in the limelight for a career would mean I would have to forfeit my privacy for my personal life. I wasn’t looking for limelight, and fame has never been or will be a goal of mine. I wanted the message of inclusive fashion to be spread, but I didn’t see how that meant spreading myself everywhere, too. In the beginning I probably erred on the side of sharing way too much personal stuff (I am by nature a really open person), but then I swung completely the other direction due to a bunch of unwanted attention about my personal life in 2011. I shut down and haven’t shared much since. I thought that if I didn’t share, then the privacy thing would get better. It hasn’t because…
2. Rumors. Even if you don’t share anything personal, people will fill in the blanks for you! I used to think rumors were something movie stars did to themselves – they were sending out press releases about their love lives to keep themselves in the news. (Yes, I really thought that was a thing.) I also thought everything I read was completely true. Of course Kelly Clarkson’s new husband cheated, right? Why else would they put that on a magazine cover? It still baffles me. I’ve seen absolutely disgusting personal rumors about me that don’t have even the slightest bit of truth to them, I’ve seen words in quotation marks that I definitely did not write and made up encounters of meeting me in real life. The entitlement people feel over privacy of anyone in the limelight will include “opinions” and speculations about a number of things you did not say or do or things that never happened. Which leads to my next point…
