Welcome to Riot Green

I'm so glad you're here.

Welcome to my first ever Substack post! Let’s get into it! First off, the name Riot Green comes from the title of a short story I wrote in Dana Spiotta’s fiction writing class at Syracuse University many moons ago. It was a mix of my two favorite bands at that time: Ra Ra Riot and Green Day. The short story is about a young couple who fall in love in New York City over a shared passion for their favorite band: Riot Green.

I always knew I was a writer but for years, I could only write about love in my work. Love was a safe topic to me because, unlike much of the pain I encountered growing up, love is a universal pain. That meant, to me, that it was an acceptable pain, one that could be discussed without shame (more on that later).

Although my story, Riot Green, started out as a love story, the darkness that was long inside me quickly shined through. The boy in the couple overdoses, chokes on his own vomit, and becomes paraplegic after becoming permanently brain damaged. The girl in the story must then decide if she’ll love him forever or leave him behind to continue on with her own life.

I didn’t know it then, but I was trying to talk about something within that story that I didn’t yet have the strength to say out loud. The biggest choice of my life — leaving Texas for New York — involved abandoning the loves of my own life, just like that girl in the story. I had to make the extremely difficult choice to give up on my family in order to pursue a dream life — one that was the culmination of all of my deepest hopes and desires.

To get something you want, you almost always have to give up something else. I gave up romantic love, familial love, and the platonic love of best friends I grew up with in order to start a life on my terms, 3,000 miles away.

Now, I’ve been in New York state and New York City for over 10 years, and the things I’ve done in this crafted life have exceeded my wildest expectations. The shame of my past: childhood abuse, homelessness, poverty, and instability no longer haunt me or follow me around like a cloud I cannot let anyone around me catch wind of. I have finally gotten to the point where I’m proud of each part of my story, and no topic is off-limits.

I have reinvented myself and my work many times, and I’m in the process of doing so right now. I want this Substack to be a place where I can share major aha moments I’ve learned in therapy, where I can encourage people to stop caring what other people think and live life on their own terms, and have fun along the way with outfit styling and beauty tips. After all, I am a beauty, fashion, and travel journalist, so that’s definitely my bread and butter. My work frequently appears in publications like Cosmopolitan, Oprah Daily, Bustle, and many more, so you can find my musings all over the internet.

However, the internet and the scope of journalism is forever changing. Nowadays, e-commerce is king, which means there’s less and less room for personal, narrative essays (that are paid fairly!). For that, I’ll drop my musings here. Thanks so much for being here, and look out for posts from me twice a month with themes, shoppable links, and much more.