Janet Mock is Living Her Best Life

My first jobs in Hawaii, when I was 15 or 16, were in clothing stores and that’s how I was able to have access to clothing that was cool or on trend, or, very Destiny’s Child-esque. It wasn’t until New York where I felt my sense of style was not just challenged, but broadened. There were vintage resale shops—I’d go through every rack at Beacon’s Closet and Ina because it was cheaper. I was inspired, too by street style. It was all so far ahead. Like walking around downtown, in the East Village, around NYU, in Greenwich Village. The images I surrounded myself with made me be like, “Oh my god I cannot wait to be able to have a job so that I can buy clothes.” It’s only in the last year that I started to become comfortable with spending money on clothes.

It’s only been in the last year that I got over the guilt of sometimes buying things that are expensive. My husband is always like, “No, you work really hard you should be able to buy the things that you want.” I buy one good handbag a year, maybe two depending on the price. I still think about price. I never not think about price. And I still have that thing where I’m like, “Well all of this can end tomorrow and I wouldn’t want to have nothing.”

Poverty! Growing up in poverty, bitch! Not having a financial safety net. I don’t have some family to fall back on who has all this money for me. If I fall, I fall. Maybe someone will give me a couch to sleep on. I won’t be homeless, but I would have to go move back to Hawaii or something. For me it comes from that sense of, I’ve only had myself to be able to make money.

I think it still goes back to what spaces I’m in. If it was a majority people of color space, where the photographer is black and the hair and makeup people are black, I’m getting my entire life on set because everyone is like, “This bitch is gorgeous!” Whereas if I’m in another space where it’s a super high fashion space, where whiteness and thinness are prided, I have this sense of wanting to shrink myself because everyone’s like, “Oh this skirt isn’t working.” The image making part of it can have all these layers to it and so the way I protect myself is to make sure I have my own hair and makeup people. It seems like such diva stuff when you hear it, but when you’re in the space, you have to think, “This image is me in front of the camera.” I’ve fought with a lot of anxiety.

Because I want people to know that it took work to do this, and that none of us wake up like this. I try to tell the truth. Most of the stuff I post on Instagram is me out doing stuff, it’s not my everyday. I post like once a week, and it took work, effort, thought, and people’s scheduling, and calendars to make this one pretty image of me.

My followers are very supportive so there’s none of that fuckery, but if I’m having a day and want to feel bad about myself and search my name on Twitter, then that becomes a whole thing. Someone will put my image up—usually a straight cis man or woman—and they’ll use it as bait to see if someone will find me attractive, and then they go: “That’s a dude,” or, “That’s a man.” And then these bizarre conversations unfold between cis people where they want to police each other’s sexuality. I have never seen a man reply and say, “She’s beautiful,” and then “She’s trans, she’s still beautiful.” It’s never that.

That part of my story hasn’t been told yet, that piece of it. It was the meeting of a lot of different things. In my career, I had reached people in a way that was cute for the first two and a half years and then it got really boring and I was on autopilot. A piece of it was that I was feeling like an unfulfilled writer who hadn’t really written anything substantial. It nagged at me. The next piece was the end of my relationship with Troy, my first husband, and before it even ending we still had that weird back and forth area where it took a year and a half to actually break up.

Yeah, he was still coming over and sleeping over and I would go to New Jersey to be with him. He would buy me stuff, we were still in this very dysfunctional relationship. I always knew I could go back so I never really let go and I kept myself tethered to him. In that time period, I maybe had six real months of being single before I met Aaron, and that was a whole different kind of relationship. I think at that point I was ready to be open. I really was moved and obsessed with this man, this beautiful, kind, open man, and so in meeting him, I let myself be vulnerable, and told him my story and that’s why it’s no coincidence that in my first book I opened with that. Even though I don’t really write about our relationship, people think that I have because the mere presence of this straight, cute guy.

I needed to tell my own story first before I could go and try and tell other people’s stories in a real, deep way. That’s how I went from being the person asking the questions to being the person answering them. I love to have conversations and to talk about them and ask questions that are through my perspective as a trans person, as a black person, as a woman of color. But I’m not on Taraji P. Henson’s level, she didn’t know who I am! On Kris Jenner’s level, she didn’t know who I am! The Kardashians, they don’t know who I am! I’m just this smart black girl that came into the room and had the conversation with them, and then if I want to bring myself into it to get them to answer a certain question, then I do that. It’s always purposeful in that sense. I guess I imagine it like Oprah before Oprah, where she had all these experiences before and she just shed those layers over and over.

I’m not trying to be Oprah, I’m trying to be myself! But in the sense of yeah, I would like to have a talk space, and I think the talk space is in transition so we don’t know what that looks like. I’m not there yet. I’m not in a rush.