Letter to The Editors

This issue is about becoming—the raw and real version of it. The kind of real that doesn’t get polished off and packaged to please the mass market. It lives in its form. It’s molded from real elements. Usually pain is involved. Patience, almost always. But truth is at its core. Becoming real: Are we?

For the last five years, Suited has been through a gauntlet of survival; clarity has been a luxury that time has not afforded. At least for me. When I started Suited, I was in a very painful state. I needed to act to stay above it.

Pain had no time to settle, no time to sink in, no time to sink me. Before the release of Issue 3, I had no money to eat, I was living off couches, I was coming out.

I’ve had to let a lot of realities hit me—and I’ve been working hard to keep some of them neatly in their place. I cannot start this issue now without sharing my own story of becoming. When I started Suited, my life was perfectly “presentable.” So was Suited, presentable to be pleasing to others. But this neatness was just chaos refined. It wasn’t living in its true form because back then, neither was I.

But I’ve learned I cannot keep pain neatly inside. I’ve released much of it, and now that energy that I was using to contain that pain can expand. It has allowed me to get the chance to look around. Compassion for the individual, anger toward the system, this issue of becoming—all of it explores the act of shifting focus to heal trauma.

Our global society has been sucked into a life of fear, a fear we’ve been sold in every way. The ones who are awake have identified that depression and fear and then work to actively remove it.

To combat a frustrated system built on ego, the most proactive thing is to be good to yourself and kind to others. Be yourself, be in love with yourself, and share who you are. Actively seek peace to break a system built on panic and anxiety. Dismantle it, not just for yourself. Be radically aware, centered, and open. Take the action needed rather than judge other people’s actions.

Resistance now means addressing what hate the world has caused us to internalize. Destruction of the ego. Undoing the self to find the self.

Realizing that admitting we don’t have it all together allows us to accept others who may be struggling with things that we can’t see.

This issue of becoming will launch Suited as a raw, real, evolved platform that rallies for change, advocates for kindness, and celebrates those who work alongside us.

Ash Owens