Anxiety: Imperfect//Unfinished//Okay.

The year of my senior thesis turned out nothing like I thought it would. I changed my concept last minute, decided to knit the whole collection a semester in, and ended up in lockdown due to the pandemic just a month before completion. The year that was supposed to be about cohesion and completing a final collection ended up being anything but; rather it turned out to be an amazing lesson in imperfection which turned out to be exactly what I needed and on a deeper level: exactly what I was going for.

I changed my concept because I realized I was not finished with the anxiety concept, let alone my own journey with the issue itself. I had more to learn, more to say, and more to create from it. What you are about to scroll through is…

Imperfect.

These overalls weigh about 12lbs and are surprisingly comfortable. Imagine being wrapped in a blanket of waves…

Unfinished.

Anxiety, creativity and growth are all big long processes that are always flowing, always changing and never feel finished. We can learn how to make them easier, or change them, but as a creative I will always be creating in some way, in many parts of my life. As a human I will always be growing, changing, learning, never quite the same person I once was, yet always the one person I am. As someone with anxiety, I can manage, release, and maybe even break from it, but it may always be a part of my story and something I am working on.

My goal with this collection was not just to express my anxiety, but to tell a story about coping through creativity, through physical experiences of wearing a variety of different clothes and the feelings of safety and comfort we want from them as we go into the world each day.

When the pandemic hit and I was unable to finish my collection, the anxiety hit me hard. I felt like a failure. I spent the next several months pushing myself into anxiety, through stress and fear from online school and a historical health crisis, to complete a bunch of clothes. Eventually I realized that this collection was not meant to be finished at this point in time, maybe not ever. And that was just a part of the story, a part of the journey, a part of this point in time.

Okay…

I have always been a bit of a perfectionist.

In college it combined with the anxiety and reached a point of fear where I was often afraid to even show the things I had tried because I wasn’t sure about the reaction I would receive. It was exhausting.

Every week I would push myself to show something random because I was afraid of not showing anything at all and the things I really wanted to be working on felt too big, or were taking too long.

Through a year of fighting for my mental health, fighting myself to just go for things and let them turn out however they may, a pandemic - among many other major historical events - I realized that it is okay and I need to let it be okay if things end up a little imperfect, unfinished or however they may. In a way it really brought me full circle, back to starting a collection where the main objective was just to create clothing, creations, environments, that could help us each feel a little more okay in our moments of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, or discomfort. A collection that could tell a story of the process of experiencing and dealing with those things and learning how to help ourselves get back to a state of being Okay.