CHAPTER 26
NEW YORK CITY, U.S.A
LYSSA
“Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours, Makes the night morning, and the noontide night.”
RICHARD III
I sat cross-legged on the floor of my West Village apartment with pages from Vogue and other prints strewn around me, hacking at paper with scissors that had been sharp until the day Root Beer rolled on a wet paint palette and I’d had to cut clumps of his fur.
Root was thrilled I was back in New York. He butted my hand, and the scissors slipped, severing Vivienne Westwood’s leg.
My project today was making a bad bitch vision board for manifesting purposes. For weeks I’d been pounding the digital street like it was a horny little slut and I was a rechargeable toy. But I still wasn’t any closer to getting a fashion job.
I’d applied for every single thing I could find in fashion, no job too small. I’d made hundreds of applications. A few were nice enough to send me a template rejection saying they had no vacancies, but I had no way of knowing if that was universally true, or if they just weren’t hiring me. Paul’s whisper network was potent.
If my mom had given me her ultimatum before my time in Aotearoa New Zealand, I would have cried to her about it, wheedling for more time or just generally being so bad at life that she would give up on the idea of sending me to college and let me rot in this apartment with my crafts and my cat like I wanted.
But I wasn’t that girl anymore.
Every time I got knocked back, I knew the issue was Paul, not me. So I just got back up again.
If this were a movie, now would be the glow up montage.
In NZ, I’d learned to trust the kindness of good people, but I’d also learned to trust myself. My livestream didn’t derail and implode my career because I was self-absorbed and reckless: it derailed because Paul was fly larvae, and because misogynists get off on bullying women on the internet.
I was taking a break from cutting, watching Root Beer lie on his back, cradling the end of the string like it was his one true love, when I got an exciting email. After weeks of no emails, this was my first yes!
A streetwear company wanted to hire me!
It was a dream offer in every way. There was actual money (not just ‘exposure’), they had great corporate values, and I would be able to learn from some really good stylists. The offices were in a popular part of Brooklyn, and their culture boasted of beanbag Fridays. It was everything I wanted. Clearly, they were outside the fashion mainstream, so Paul’s blacklist probably worked in my favor.
Most importantly, this job would keep me in New York. Like I wanted.
Or … like I thought I wanted.
I opened an email window to reply that I would take it.
But I couldn’t make my fingers type.
This was the right job, the right address, the right pay, and the right industry.
But now, when I closed my eyes and let my mind turn to wanting, these weren’t the things I saw. Instead, visions of green trees and too many cheesecake shops and big shoulders and a warm, wide smile came to me.
What I wanted had changed. I’d just been too stubborn to admit it. I tried to picture myself pulling all-nighters to bring someone else’s creative vision to life, and my whole body shuddered.
I declined the job offer.
I was sick of working on other people’s dreams. I was going to work on mine.
This didn’t mean I was going to Brown. But I was going to go somewhere. I was going to travel more. Get a cheaper apartment out of the city where I could nest and make the place mine. Make it a home. Somewhere, maybe, that Hollidays could come and stay with me if any of them wanted to visit America.
I threw myself back into online content creation, which was something that I could do from anywhere and freed me up to live wherever. Making fashion content was something I loved; I just didn’t love the trolls. I set up ruthless profanity filters and got trigger-happy with the block button. When I blocked someone who then made new accounts, like mold spores, I made reports to the social media companies—who, of course, did nothing, but I persisted. The trolls wanted me ashamed; they wanted to hound me offline so they could feel powerful. I refused to give them the satisfaction of my attention any longer. Once my accounts were in decent shape, I used the last of the money I had made on my last sponsorship deal to hire someone for ten hours a week to moderate my channels for me. Hiring Mati as my dedicated community manager was a bougie move for an unemployed girl whose days with mommy’s credit card were numbered, but I’d finally realized I needed to prioritize my mental health to get my career back on track.
I wasn’t going to continue to jeopardize my well-being just to read my own hate mail. Not anymore.
Interestingly, the moment Mati made an auto-reply saying my DMs weren’t monitored (a lie), a lot of the hate died down. And he was ruthless enforcing my boundaries in the comments too.