Behind the low stone wall.

Last summer I made some quip about thinking I’d never buy another boho-lookin’ peasant blouse again because that wasn’t really my aesthetic anymore and I think I was a few weeks out from selling off all my old ones—irony. But there was a crisp simplicity to the cut, the heavy-weight linen, and the not-too-cute embroidery that felt so right and it carried me through an entire summer. I got so few new “pieces” last summer, with every weekend spent in bathing suits and towels, but the ones I did worked so well (and went on to go with jeans and leather belts into the cooler fall days) that when I saw Madewell was rebooting last year’s for this season, I added it to my mix of monochromatic basics.

It’s verging on “cute”—which doesn’t help me out when we’re already working with a blouson shape and a pair of d-cups—but the colors drew me in on a dreary day and it cheers me up whenever I pop it on. (Sorry about the neon bra showing through.)

In keeping with my whole deal, though, I gotta pair it with something like black cutoffs or a leather mini skirt or someone might be inclined to hand me a lollypop and ask me where my mommy is.

(Jk I’m way too haggard for that.)

*listen to this*

[Two Madewell Wildfield tops from last year, a Joie top from the clearance rack, and this year’s Madewell Springtime embroidered top, available in dress form in black at Shopbop.]

In all seriousness, I often think about why certain clothes draw us in vs. others. Sentimentality? Ease? Confidence? Comfort? To me, the entire boho aesthetic is a snowglobe of a decade of my life that lets me examine a version of myself. I can look in and see someone innocent, naive, and starting to figure out who I was and how I wanted to dress. I’ve talked about this time before—vinyl, Derek and the Dominoes, Anita Pallenberg, a lead singer boyfriend, lots of John Irving, introspection, and one magical, transformative trip to France. I think by opting in with these shirts, I’m in some way admitting I’m still (somewhat) who I was back then—or maybe hoping. But definitely still a romantic and an idealist.

Here are some more similar ones from Madewell I picked for ya:

I was just texting with my pal in a sort of semi-fictional way in which we half-seriously plot our escape from the real world. (I mean, have you looked around lately? Who wouldn’t.) Last year we’d communicate this concept with bus and wind poof emoji sent over text, indicating our very cool tricked-out camper van we’d travel the country in with cats in tow. The speeding bus text came at encouraging times, a sort of “Don’t worry; soon we’ll be on the bus, seeing the world, leaving it all behind.”

Today, after self-inflicting a totally incomprehensible punishment on myself by going down the rabbit hole of a few poisonous (to me) Instagram accounts, I revisited the bus concept but this time suggested my go-to escape pod, one I’ve gone to in my mind many times in the last ten years. It’s my failsafe sort of Eden: a boat on the Canal du Midi in France. That transformative trip.

[Bear with me on a quick memory lane. Below, me manning the starboard lines in one of the many ship locks we passed through on the Canal. This was an active trip; you always had to be ready to pop up and hop off the boat to tie up to a cleat, then master the slow loosening of the line as the water line rose or lowered, as the case may be. As we traveled further south from the Pyrenees region to the Mediterranean, the air got hotter and the terrain dustier. I was in heaven.]

[Below: Scene from Trebes, across the street from Domaine de la Roque! A traveling Brit poked me in the boob at that bar; my dad was not thrilled. And a typical canal view, which did not suck to see all day long from under the shady plane trees once planted to camouflage ships carrying weapons during WWII from planes flying above.]

[Below, some dream real estate—top is a lock keeper’s house, which often double as shops or cafes—and the central square of a small town along the way, but I can’t recall which—maybe Colombiers? Are you getting a sense for how wonderfully sleepy this place was?]

[Huge bug eye shades + a typical lunch while everything shut down for two hours in the middle of the day. Below that, me hammering in a pique into the spot where we’d chill for the night.]

If I moved there, I most certainly wouldn’t have Internet, right? Which would mean no Instagram either, right?

Let me talk about this Instagram thing for another second, because I need to get this hopefully totally relatable thing off my chest. I call it the consumption landslide in my head, and what you’re consuming is really difficult to regulate this day in age, when algorithms and suggestions respond to your covertly looking at one photo of an admirable bottom in a small bathing suit by then suggesting to you every other perfect bottom on the planet—something I for one do not enjoy being berated with in mass quantities right before falling asleep in a last pass through my feed.

Pop quiz: Are the below photos pages from a smut magazine, stills from a porno, or a lingerie catalogue?

NOPE. They’re photos from actual humans’ Instagram accounts, like in their homes and gyms and bathrooms. People I started following at some point or another for dumb reasons. Maybe because my boyfriend followed one (totally allowed, who wouldn’t?), and I wanted to see what he saw. Maybe because it was inspiring? But then I wonder, inspiring in what way? To what, remind me not to eat? To inspire me to work out more? Or to torture myself with unrealistic images of abnormally perfect people I’ll never look like? (Seriously, what is with that waist bottom left? Jesus.)

{Sidenote: Can you even imagine what my brother would say if I posted a photo like any of the above? Or my mom? Where are these people’s moms and brothers!? WHERE IS THEIR DIGNITY?}

I needed to give myself a serious reality check. Setting aside the unsettling fact that these kinds of things used to be just in VS catalogs that boys could swipe and peek at, or Playboys, or SI issues, but are now readily consumable by young girls (and even old girls), these were beginning to clog my feed. I saw them all day on an app that I used to love to visit for quirky photography, neat perspectives and finds, funny post-its left by coworkers, and cool travels. I’d self-inflicted a new app: a torture-the-living-shit-out-of-myself app. Like a perfect cocktail of destruction, I bottled these images up in my head along with my own image of myself, and the fact that for a reason I couldn’t control, I was once dumped for not being right/enough. And I’d been sipping on this cocktail in small doses, not realizing how much it was poisoning me until I vomited all my insides up all over the place last night and it wasn’t pretty.

This morning, I unfollowed every single account—the swimsuit companies, the Aussie tanning cream company, the models, the athletes, the “fitness gurus”—and not a moment too soon.

—

When the going gets tough or bleak and society just lets me down over and over and it feels like I can’t trust a soul, I have always imagined moving to a tiny, dusty town on the banks of that canal, shacking up in one of the little houses with the low stone walls that butted up to the path along the water. Hiding from the world. I can picture the tabac where I’d buy shampoo and soap and the market next door where I bought cheese wrapped in brown paper and a sausage on a string that day. No big scene, no traffic, no bullshit—just wandering cathedrals and sipping cheap wine in a simple life with sun and wheat and cicadas and (in my imagination) lots of flowing, embellished tops and dresses that conceal the inevitability of age and waning of desirability.

Turns out, I don’t need to move to France to remove these things from my life. I just need to remove them.

They always say to take the high road in conflict. I’m not the best at that, especially when no one is partaking in the conflict but me. (Read: Agonizing over photos of flawless and filtered women, simultaneously noting how irrevocably different from them I am—for better or for worse.) When I feel overwhelmed by these trains of thought, quick daydreams about my fictional life in the southwest of France were my high road. It centered me, calmed me down, and reminded me that women on Instagram should not occupy such a large portion of my brain space—and they also shouldn’t be my yardstick. Or at least if I could just escape it all, they wouldn’t be. Because they’ll always be there, really. I can’t shield every man I’m with from them, nor should I try.

—

Insecurity and inadequacy are just so easy to consume these days, laid out like a free endless buffet of ways to make you feel like shit about yourself. Filtered lives can act like a black hole that’s taking big gulps of dignity right out of the air we breathe. I let that hole suck all mine up, that’s for sure. Instagram does so little to promote, celebrate, emphasize or explain things like successful careers, meaningful relationships, intelligence, and generosity—things that should really spell out what makes a person great. Instead, it emphasizes bodies, pretty faces, wealth, and leisure—and I just can’t help but wonder where these people will end up, how fulfilled they really are in real life, or what they’d do if Instagram didn’t exist. Really, though, what would they do?

I look back on these photos of myself in embroidered tunics, sitting on the bow of the boat under a canopy of whispering plane trees, hunched over a journal—and man, I want that simplicity back, in the time before smart phones and the voyeuristic ability to see strangers in their underwear in front of their bedroom mirrors. There was a peace and mystery and authenticity that defined that part of my life. If I could just channel that again, you know?

I don’t really want to move to France and hide behind a stone wall. Sure, it’d be a great view, but as it turns out, I can control the view on the world I have from here—with a few taps on the Unfollow button.

“It’s fine,” said in my best Megan Parry voice.

-C.

“I get so lonely // I forget what I’m worth
We get so lonely // we pretend that this works
I’m so ashamed of myself think I need therapy-y-y-y
I’m sorry I’m not more attractive
I’m sorry I’m not more ladylike
I’m sorry I don’t shave my legs at night.”