I Catalogued My Wardrobe!

I’ve been wanting to do this for months but resisted the urge because it would be an “unproductive” time sink. It would mean spending five hours taking pictures of my clothing and jewelry which I’m sure seems like a huge waste of time to the average person. The thing is, though, it was productive for me. The process itself was tedious, sure, but each time I finished another chunk of my closet, it immediately felt worth it. 

I’m now able to view my wardrobe digitally (Clueless style) and put together outfits without trying on different combinations, which has already saved a lot of time. I’m pretty sure that over the course of a month or two, I’ll actually get those five hours back.

My outfits this past week :)

I used an app called Indyx for this endeavor and I couldn’t recommend it enough. I started by taking flat-lay pictures of each article of clothing and then tagged by type, color, etc. When I was done, I was eager to see the data on my closet composition.

Then, I put together the outfits that were already in my Notes app folder and added them to my calendar based on the date of the photo taken. Sure enough, the app generated another set of data based on my closet usage. There is nothing I love more than some data on myself (stay tuned for my 2025 boba wrapped).

My most owned colors (besides neutrals and denim) are pink, followed closely by purple and orange and absolutely no one is surprised. The other statistics I’ve included here are ones I’m quite proud of. Nearly a third of my wardrobe is secondhand and I’ve worn 70% of my clothes over the last three months. That’s pretty solid considering not all of my outfits are logged.

The next step, of course, was what I had gotten this app to be able to do — plan future outfits. I had so much fun fiddling with different combinations, especially outlandish ones I’d never waste my time on if I had to physically try them on.

On the left is the outfit I planned for beabadoobee this Thursday and on the right is the outfit I planned for a beach day next Sunday!

That’s all on how I’ve used Indyx so far, but here are some of the ways I’m excited to utilize the app in the future. I’ll be able to upload pictures of prospective purchases to see if I really will get wear out of each item I want to buy. Hopefully, that will help my spending problem. I’ll also be able to avoid my tendency to overpack because I can easily create a capsule wardrobe and experiment with various outfits from the same pieces. Ultimately, I’m most looking forward to seeing more accurate usage statistics as I start tracking my outfits every day so I can donate clothes over the summer.

Butterfly Pea Flower Tea

TW: brief mention of suicide

Butterfly Pea Flower Tea, on its own, tastes like shit. I would say it tastes like bland dirt but I’ve heard others say it tastes like green bean water or asparagus. Its appeal is just the vibrant blue color and the novelty of becoming purple when it reacts with lemon juice. Some of my favorite boba drinks, though, have Butterfly Pea Flower Tea in them. Those drinks always have lemon too — the Puppy Love from Calibear Cyber Cafe is lemon and passion fruit flavored and the Galaxy Iced Tea from It’s Boba Time adds strawberry lemonade to the Butterfly Pea Flower Tea. 

On Monday, my Galaxy Iced Tea with mango jelly and aloe vera was the only good part of my day. I was incredibly depressed and all I wanted was to get out of my own head. I was sick of trying so hard and having to put in an enormous amount of effort every day merely to keep myself safe. And at that point I wasn't even doing it for myself. It would have been a lot easier to let go and drown in my misery but I kept going for all the people that care about me and believe in me whenever I’m unable to.

As I reflect on Monday, I find myself very grateful for how adept and supportive my IOP clinicians are. Suicidality was a concern on Monday and instead of jumping straight to hospitalization — like most MH professionals would — when I said I was unsure if I could keep myself safe, my therapist did the absolute most to ensure my safety while remaining outpatient. She consulted with one of her colleagues before staying an hour past the end of her workday to counsel. She was with me while I called my parents to tell them what was going on and encouraged me to communicate exactly what they could do to be most supportive. She then helped me come up with a plan to stay 100% safe till IOP the next day and workshopped it till I answered with a confident “yes” when asked if I could keep myself safe.

Throughout the evening, things got better and then worse again when two of my friends couldn’t be there for me in the way I requested. I was already extremely dysregulated and I couldn’t handle that rejection, so I called my IOP’s emergency clinician/therapist, whom I’m also super grateful for. After hearing what happened, she challenged my expectation of friends as mental health support. She claimed it’s a “beautiful transition” to move away from expecting a friend to act as a “therapist or a meal coach or a suicide hotline” because I have more professional support than I ever have. When she put it that bluntly, it felt like splitting the beam. I guess I have expected a lot of friends in the past. But that was almost normalized at my high school — a ton of people were openly struggling with their mental health so people just understood. What even is a friend who doesn’t offer mental health support?

Of course, there’s so many other things I appreciate from my friends. Laughing, gossiping, chatting, partying, plus all the different ways there are to hang out. I just can’t help but wonder if these friendships will ever feel complete when I don’t feel supported at my lowest. According to the same therapist, my lowest is at a very heightened intensity compared to the average person so the average person is not going to have the capacity to be there for me in those moments. She is encouraging me to lean more on my care team instead of repeatedly having my needs not met by friends. To be fair, I do have a lot of professionals in my corner. There’s my primary therapist, my emergency therapist, the third IOP therapist, my psychiatrist, my dietician, and my pediatrician. A large part of me continues to feel ashamed about needing so much help. Every time I reach out for additional support, it feels like more evidence of my unworthiness. Friends feel like the “normal” support system, so I wish I could lean on them more. I guess I need to come to terms with my friends not being able to fulfill all my needs. It wasn’t normal that at my high school everyone and their mother was depressed, anxious, or both. It wasn’t normal that people at my high school wouldn’t freak out if you said you were suicidal because they understood feeling that way versus intent to act on it are two completely different things. It wasn’t normal for people at my high school to know more about mental health than the average undergraduate psychology student.

On Thursday, I had my individual therapy session and we talked a lot about my interpersonal issues, where they come from, and what to do about it now. I tend to be very other-focused and in the process, devalue myself. Even at my lowest, I’m able to show up for and support others in ways a lot of people aren’t at their highest. That’s probably part of where the cycle of high expectations and disappointment comes from. If I can do it for them, why can’t they do it for me?  What I have to work on now is moving away from the habit of considering others and their feelings way before my own so I can devote more energy into taking care of myself and my needs. But that’s fucking scary. I feel like I am Butterfly Pea Flower Tea and my friends and family are the lemon juice. I’m bland and worthless without my connection to others. Pouring into others and giving more than I get is how I’ve stayed afloat this long since it gives me purpose and joy. Of course it’s scary to shift from something I’ve practiced my whole life. The first step, though, is doable. And that’s to start to notice. Notice when I’m prioritizing others over myself, notice when I’m casting myself into the Butterfly Pea Flower Tea role. Once I’m aware and noticing, I can begin to try and change it. Something my therapist constantly tells me is “Siona needs a Siona.” And she’s right. It’s time to give myself the care and compassion I’m always giving others.

To Write or Not to Write?

TW: brief mention of suicide

As I navigate my second semester of college, I am finding myself doing a lot of reflection and introspection. For one thing, I'm in an Intensive Outpatient Program to continue to work through my mental illnesses, so I'm kind of forced to. But even aside from that, I didn't realize how much being thrust into a new, cutthroat environment without my parents' direct support would threaten a sense-of-self I naively believed was fully developed. As I reckon with the questions about who I am, I continue to come back to my identity as a writer.

For most of high school, I wrote and edited for the student run newspaper, the Forecaster. Forecaster started out as my first social community in high school and was a place I built up confidence because I knew I added value to the team. And to its credit, it remained that safe space for me for the better part of three years. In a lot of ways, journalism was my saving grace because I finally had a hobby/passion I felt I was good at, as opposed to gymnastics where I was always behind. Forecaster was also the first place I proudly identified as a lesbian, as opposed to middle school where I pretended to have crushes on boys and told people I was bisexual.

Eventually, things changed dramatically. I was heavily involved in the investigation and writing process for a censored sexual harassment article published in 2023. As a survivor of both physical sexual assault and many of the digital forms of sexual harassment the article touched on, it was distressing to see administration much more concerned with protecting the perpetrators' wellbeing than that of the victims'. It was even more distressing to see my peers, whom I held to the highest standards of journalistic integrity, crumble under the pressure and prioritize maintaining a cordial relationship with admin over fully covering the stories people bravely shared with us. When some of my peers spoke up months later, it proved to me there was remorse for succumbing to and initially vehemently denying any censorship occurred. After some distance from the situation, I have much more compassion for the decisions my peers made. I better understand now how the executive team had an obligation to think about the future of the Forecaster in a way I didn't and we were all dealing with what might be a very difficult situation for professional journalists, let alone student journalists with barely a few years of experience. At the same time, I wish some of the demeaning comments about me hadn't been made (namely "Do you realize how much you're inconveniencing us by stepping down?" and the rumors spread about how I didn't care about male mental health).

If you combine the build up of this situation with the huge blow to my self worth that was losing the editor-in-chief race a month prior and my preexistent mental health issues, you get a near suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. After how traumatized I felt by my last few months in Forecaster, I swore off journalism for life. I would never put myself in that environment again.

However, I do deeply miss journalistic writing, particularly the publication aspect since I'm very passionate about social change and journalism was the vehicle through which I saw myself making a concrete difference in the world. I still do write for myself and of course there's value in that (for example, i think writing is the best way to sort through your own opinion on a complex subject) but the paramount reason I enjoyed tackling the tough subjects through in-depth analyses was because i saw the impact — whether it was as simple as amplifying a previously suppressed voice or in a few instances, directly contributing to policy change or community-wide mobilization. In a phrase, journalism gave me purpose, more so than anything ever has.

Anyway, all of this is to say, despite the paralyzing fear, I really want to get back to journalism eventually. I was good at it and more importantly, I loved it. Creating this website feels like an intermediate step. I’ll be able to get comfortable with my writing having an audience again but in a safe, contained space.

Thank you for being here to support me in my journey to find my voice again.