One day my therapist gave me homework to journal around something that I had said in therapy, “You realize that you just called yourself a mutant?” She asked, “That’s a horrible thing to say about yourself.” And she wanted me to make a list of every time in my life that I’ve felt like a mutant. I knew that the flashbacks would be way too intense for me to do that so I asked her if I could put it into a story (sometimes I write my pain as stories) and she agreed.
I tried to write the story but for some reason the story wouldn’t write itself like it did when I was able to write about the woman with the secret peaches. This story just wouldn’t flow and I felt so ill after writing it. I was sitting at Starbucks (I had just missed the bus and luckily there was a Starbucks by the bus station) and so I started to work on my therapy homework and here’s the cool thing though – because as a coach who is completely somatic healing and how the mind works I completely geeked out on this. I always think it’s interesting how fashion and style shows up in healing.
When I attempeted to write my story I ended up writing a story about how a woman had spots appeard on her body and she walked around feeling ugly and being used by others and one day she met a woman who had stripes on her body.
Well my geek out part is that I have had a love of leopard print for years. And I realized that the the leopard print represented the spots. And the woman with stripes on her? Well, I was looking at an interview with my mentor Carla Maria Cadotte and at the end of the interview the person who was interviewing her asked if she could do an outfit of the day – she did and she was wearing a tiger print dressed! I’ve watched that interview about a million times but I definitely wasn’t thinking of it when writing my story! How cool is that?
Want to hear another neat twist? In January I was taking a class with my life stylist Tonya Leigh and one of the classes in the course was about rewriting your past and how to write it as story with headlines and flavor that belongs in Vogue vs. The Enquire. Well in this particular class she was wearing a leopard print dress!
Some people are spoken too with visions and meditations (I’ve had those too) but mostly, the way that I think, breath, and live is with fashion. Which to me – is the most decadently delicious place to live!