Fashion Stories & Dirty Laundry

Raw. I hate it. I can’t stand sushi, raw oysters, anything of the such, and haven’t had caviar in years. I also dislike steak tartare. Raw celery, now that’s good. Anything that used to walk, crawl, swim or float should not be raw.

But in writing? Raw is the best.

I recently finished James Franco’s Palo Alto Stories. And say what you want about him personally or what you’ve read about him, he is a formidable and insightful artist. A powerful actor and director, his writing is exactly that – raw. Sometimes almost too much. I will only read that book once as it’s often overtly graphic and sexual, often disturbing, deals with some crime and aberrant behavior that I didn’t even know occurred in high school; nonetheless, his technical prowess and detail of a writer is a force. He writes like the filmmaker he is, an acute attention to detail and consistently visual.

The main ingredient is its rawness.

Similar to the tired ‘devil is in the details’, true human behavior is revealed in the raw. No, not the ‘private becoming pubic’. Not physical nakedness or provocative selfies. Not the silly and sad ‘Influencers in the Wild’ on Instagram. That is not raw. That is attention grabbing self-indulgence cries from people that crave something far deeper than the Likes and Comments they pursue.

No, raw is the unearthed cry of our souls for all its longings, delights, mistakes, joys, fears, sadness and awareness that we will all end up 6 feet under. Raw is the realization that we have a finite time on this earth. Raw isn’t ‘airing our dirty family laundry’. God forbid! It’s so much more. Raw is connecting our ‘good, bad and ugly’ with others on this journey. A wise Pastor once told me, “If you are truthful and really tell your stories, they will help others.” How many of us really have the guts to do that? To be transparent with our failures? To open portions of our heart as pages for others to read? Not many of us.

Time to get raw.