Confessions of a Pinterest Junkie
Hello, my name is Jessie. I’m an addict. [Hi Jessie.] My addiction began in March 1988 with the inaugural issue of Sassy magazine. One glance and I was forever changed and straight-up obsessed.
As a pre-teen, I had more subscriptions to magazines than I had clothes. Mom, my enabler (God bless her), kept me hopped up on Sassy, Seventeen, Cosmo (yeah baby), Elle, Vogue, Elle Decor and the occasional Bazaar. I’d steal away, read them cover to cover a few times over, earmark the articles and pictures I needed to keep, painstakingly cut them out and file them away into folders that housed specific categories: Life, Career, Fashion, Beauty, Home Decor, Food, Travel.
The inside doors of my teenage closets became canvases for magazine-page collages depicting who I wanted to become. They mostly donned images of women in positions of power—I have a distinct recollection of one woman standing over a boardroom table full of men—as well as ladies dressed to the nines for an evening out. (And she always, always wore red.)
College dorm rooms and post-collegiate apartments followed suit. They were punctuated by stacks of magazines on floors, desks and dressers, as was my first boyfriend-shared home. Although by that time, Real Simple had hit the scene, so I learned to organize, prioritize and, for crying out loud, show some restraint, Jessie! We do not plop piles of magazines around the home. We put them neatly into bookshelves and arrange them by color!
A fashion spread from the author’s 1988 Sassy magazine.
Then it happened. The internet went and digitized my personality, giving my preexisting pathology even better software.
And holy shit, did my addiction kick into overdrive.
Today I get my fix by scrolling, clicking, reading, researching and pinning. I can get lost for hours going down rabbit holes of things I want to create, places I want to see and visions (still) of who I want to be in this life. With the exception of a few mis-targeted ads, my feed is a tantalizing and stunning collection of endless possibilities.
And there it is, folks, the root of my addiction realized: possibilities.
I am wholeheartedly addicted to the idea of what can be.
This explains a lot more than my 117 Pinterest boards and crafty pre-teen folders of clippings. It’s probably why I’ve spent my adult life making things—homes, businesses, brands, wine pairings, paintings. Show me what something could be and apparently I have a pathological need to find out if I can make it so.
The ultimate capsule wardrobe? Built it! I’ve got a closet full of clothing that reflects my personal style: business-centric with a hint of edge, risk and whimsy. Might I add, the only color in my closet is red?
I’ll spend four fucking hours on a Sunday hand-rolling lorighittas, tagliolini and farfalle. I’m no Marc Vetri, so it’s a bitch of a project, but man does it taste fantastic. And I’ll pair the sauce to the pasta cut and the wine with it all, naturally (and if I’m lucky, natural).
Once upon a time, there was a parcel of land in the Arizona mountains that needed a restaurant. I created that too. Not the menu, per se—that was the chef-husband’s job—but the brand and interior design concept.
For decades, I’ve thrived on the hunt for all that is possible. Only now am I beginning to realize that I’ve gone and turned a surprising amount of these possibilities into reality. The fact that my eleven-year-old self had the foresight to plant the seeds of the woman I have now become quite frankly blows my freakin’ mind.
She had such a lovely vision for herself.
And apparently, I had the cojones to take those grand visions and make them my life.
I’ve endured plenty of sideways comments about my addiction. But I choose to ignore them and pin forth. Judge all you want, people. The only twelve steps I’ll be taking in the future will be the steps from my fabulous island home to the turquoise-blue ocean.
I’ve pinned it.
So it will be.