I’ve finally reached the half way mark in my studio redecorating project, and while I’m yet to pick out (and save up for) the perfect desk, I do have my “frog vomit green” carpet installed. Slowly but surely I am making my way through the boxes and boxes of extraneous bits and pieces that I need to get rid of, occasionally unearthing little treasures. Old news clippings of my great grandparents wedding anniversary, drawings from my children, the odd spider and even some proof sheets from my very first proper modelling job! (*aside* I find it amusing that at the time, 1997, I was considered a “mature” model as I was no longer in my teens).

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If you follow me on Intsagram or Twitter, you’ll have seen one of these pop up the other day. I was trying to remember all the things I loved at the time, the music I was listening to and what my aspirations were. Way back in those days before blogging and when the internet was just BBS’s (if you know what that is you’ve been here as long as me!), we had to rely on diaries and photos to keep track of such things. Because I was always faulty at keeping much of a record of my activities (ironic isn’t it?), I have to rely on the boxes of things that appear during these clean ups to remind me.

There was an old mix tape, my first ever cassingle (Poison’s Unskinny Bop?! Clearly I was trying to impress someone at that point), actual scrap books of clippings from fashion mags applied with paste, tightly held swap cards and even a few pictures of my favourite old hollywood stars.

Back before I could Google images and find exactly what I wanted to see, coming across vintage images of stars, their styling and wardrobes, wasn’t an easy thing. If you were very dedicated, you’d take blurry photos on a film camera of the screen shoot you’d paused on the crummy VHS recoding of that old film. I had, (and still have) every printed book of stage and screen stars my pocket money would buy me, some still indexed with colour coded book marks for era.

Before trawling op shops / thrift stores was trendy, it was essential for girls like me who wanted to learn from the past. And before the internet we were alone. Just a girl wearing dead people’s clothes, living in a fantasy world and making it come to life through lipstick.

And now that we have all that in our digital age; the connections, the community, the resources and knowledge, I have to ask…

What’s stopping you from becoming the version of yourself you truly want to be?