My dad gave me a hard time, and all I could tell him was that I wanted to be an expert. Whatever I ended up specializing in, I would make sure to be the best at it. I was a hard worker, I always had been, and finally . . . I saw a lady painting a model’s nails on the set of a photo shoot and thought, I would be really good at that!
I quit my various part-time jobs and enrolled in LA’s cheapest beauty school. I was at my all-time most stressed and poor, sitting under fluorescent lighting, wearing a dust mask, watching a cheesy lady demonstrate airbrush makeup on a fake head. But I always knew it would work out.
Now I’m an on-set, freelance manicurist on fashion editorial and commercial photo shoots, I develop nail products, and I work on lots of creative projects that have anything to do with nails. In short, I’m an expert.
When I’m not working, I’m still working. I’m always observing, I’m taking photos of patterns and colors I see on the streets, I’m jotting down ideas, I’m meeting new people, connecting the dots, researching my craft, trying out new products, giving my friends manicures, working on my website, updating my social media accounts, working on my own products, on collaborative projects, putting together inspiration boards or sketching new ideas. I’m working on my craft and my business not because I feel obligated, but because I love it. I’ve always had to work hard because I had no other choice, but I always believed in myself.
I always knew I’d be a #GIRLBOSS.
“Discomfort was where I was most comfortable.”
4
Shoplifting (and Hitchhiking) Saved My Life
We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were to be lived. Life serves the risk taker.
—Evasion
I don’t remember the first thing I stole. However, I do remember (with zero pride) that it happened a lot. At one point, someone tried to recruit me to shoplift an Apple MacBook for him, and that was when I realized that holy shit, I have a reputation as a thief. There are plenty of things I’d like to be known for (armpit farting, photography, my legendary dance moves), but being a fabulous shoplifter is not one of them.
I’m not proud of this phase of my life. And it’s so far removed from who I am now that it sometimes seems surreal. Recently, I had a meeting with executives from Nordstrom, and then a few days later, a meeting with the CEO of Michael Kors. And the whole time, I’m sitting in this meeting, thinking, Oh, my god, I stole a Michael Kors watch from Nordstrom when I was seventeen. . . . These were my lost years, and there were dozens of times when I could have irreparably messed up my future. It is a miracle, and through no fault of my own, that I didn’t.
On Anarchism, for a Sec
People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
—Emma Goldman
For the latter half of my teen years, I was pretty lost. Though I knew who I was and always refused compromise, I had no clue what I wanted. I was willing to try almost anything, but my incessant desire to simultaneously reject everything created a challenging paradox. Another way to describe this attitude would be “immature.”
When I was still living with my parents, I made the drive from Sacramento to the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco every year. As you can imagine, I listened to a lot of angry music in those days. When I was fifteen, I discovered Refused’s album, The Shape of Punk to Come, and that turned me on to Guy Debord and the Situationists. I’d already been heavy into Emma Goldman, and was frequenting a Marxist study group in which my friends and I were the only people under forty. As I said before, as a teenager, I thought that life sucked and that my life—“oppressed” as I was by school and the suburbs—especially sucked. The ideals of anarchism were perfect for me. I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world. I thought that big corporations were running the world (which I now know they do) and by supporting them, I was condoning their evil ways (which is true, but a girl’s gotta put gas in her car).
I wanted to live outside the capitalist structure, to live free and travel free, and to exist outside a nine-to-five lifestyle. I was like an old bearded hippie trapped in a teenage girl’s body. I wanted to live spontaneously and to find myself in wild places, with wild people, and have wild times. Let me remind you, I was naïve enough to believe this was how I could live my life indefinitely. But thinking back now makes me scared for my former self the way any mother would be scared for her teenage daughter doing what I did.
Do not knock a dumpstered bagel until you’ve tried one.
At seventeen, before I even graduated high school, I moved out. My parents were in the midst of their divorce and too busy dismantling two decades of marriage to keep me safe any longer. I embarked on my dream of an adventurous life, trying on as many different experiences as I could. I was vegan. I was freegan. I hitchhiked to an Earth First! Rendezvous in the middle of the forest where I ate magic mushrooms and watched people set a pentagram made of sticks on fire. I refused to buy new wood; too angry with capitalism’s disregard for sustainability, I furnished my places with a mix of sidewalk freebies and lifted merch instead. I dumpster-dived at Krispy Kreme, dated a guy who lived in a tree house, and had hair upon my legs.
While this all may sound extreme, it didn’t seem that way to me at the time. I’d felt like an outsider my entire life, in every school and at every job, and had finally thrown in the towel on finding anyplace that I completely belonged. Discomfort was where I was most comfortable.
Sun’s Out, Thumbs Out
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
—Junot Díaz
When I was seventeen, I decided to hitchhike to Olympia, Washington. Joanne, my travel companion I’d known for a total of twenty-four hours, and I stood on the shoulder of an on-ramp in Downtown Sacramento, holding up a cardboard sign. The first person who picked us up was a Russian guy named Yuri, who was driving a little Honda with a busted-out back window and a bashed-in steering column. In outlaw terms, the car was likely stolen. NBD, right? Nothing weird about that. I had a switchblade on my belt (it was for cutting apples!), and besides, we were invincible. Disclaimer: Please don’t ever, ever do any of the stupid things that I talk about in this chapter.
We asked Yuri where he was headed, and started to get suspicious when he said West Sacramento, which we had already passed and was many miles behind us on the freeway. After some negotiation, he finally agreed to drop us off in Redding, which was at least on the way to where we were going. Then he threw in the deal breaker.
“For love?” he said.
“No!” I shrieked back, too grossed out to be scared. We demanded that he let us out, and he started to apologize right away. But if the hot-wired car had somehow not tipped us off to the fact that he was a creepy dude, the “for love” deal breaker left little doubt. Yuri let us out at a gas station, still apologizing profusely in broken English, and this was how we found ourselves stuck outside a town called Zamora, backpacks in tow, and not another building in sight.