How to look like yourself

20something diaries. personal identity, banana bread & October recommendations, and some eye candy

Welcome to the October board meeting,

📌 TODAY’S AGENDA

• How to look like yourself // a reflection on personal identity

• October month-in-review // perfect banana bread, winter skincare and these outrageous pyjamas

• For your viewing pleasure // recent Pinterest saves

💌 INVITE LIST

• Sexy people only // (you)

⏳ ICYMI // Last month’s wrap-up _ In Pursuit of Hotness & Wellness _ How to rest

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How to look like yourself

I suppose it is a sense of arriving.

A journey, an endless one, of the lives you will have led, the life you are living. Each incarnation and narrative compounded, iterated and refined until it forms a path back home to your own self.

Personal identity is a funny topic in a world where brands behave more like people than people themselves know how to.

Forgive me because I have a specific person or maybe persons in mind when I ask this,

How much of your personality is yours, and how much of it was manufactured for you by a marketing department, and some strain of aspirational lifestyle content?

Do you have any interests or hobbies that do not involve vanity-fuelled consumption, is any of it practiced without desire for validation, can you do anything without thinking about how you might stage it for your instagram story?

Do you see yourself through your own eyes, or do you take a bird’s eye view of your life, seeing only outside-in, from the perspective of a watcher?

Are you an outsider in your own life, as disconnected from yourself as a stranger?

(It’s okay, I’ve been there too.)

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

On Photography, Susan Sontag

Art imitates life and vice versa. No doubt we become influenced by what we consume on the media, but when a person’s presentation, interests, seemingly entire inner world starts to look like a copy + paste of every trending outfit or internet archetype, it is like, okay, … where are you underneath all this? Are you capable of forming an opinion or making a choice independent of what you are seeing online?

I have a friend, whose sister always shows up (the few times i’ve met her) in colour, and pattern, there’s corduroy and velvet and silk, high-top sneakers or chunky boots, kitsch earrings and some kind of funky print. I always look at her and think, she feels so comfortable with who she is. Every part of what she has on fit like jigsaw pieces with her personality.

She just looks like herself, you know?

I think I love her a little bit for it. Is there anything we need more than a woman who is comfortable in her own skin?

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How do you look like you, and what does it mean to come home to yourself?

I started asking this question only recently (and maybe breaking up with social media had a little or a lot to do with it), because I found myself thinking exactly this when getting dressed each morning: Hey, I look like myself.

It was a thought that made me smile.

I wrote this, in The Politics of Pretty: Collated Notes:

Today, maybe for the first time in my life, I feel firm enough in my own skin, in who I am with all my strengths and flaws, to know that I am so much more than my outward shell.

It was a journey that took many turns I guess, one that probably looks different for each one of us.

I began to see myself more clearly when I learned to become someone I could depend upon. I honed my intuition and learned to trust my instincts. I learned to take care of myself.

And not in a self-care Sunday, put-on-a-mask kind of way.

In a,

• Having the courage to back yourself, always, kind of way

Even when all my choices went against prevailing public (family and friends) opinion. I learned to never waver in my conviction, and have seen things play out against all odds as a result.

• Ruthless prioritisation and sacrifice, kind of way

I started saying more accurate yes’s and no’s.

No to anything or anyone that drained more than filled me, even if it meant less friends and less instagramable moments or whatever;

yes to things that added to my life in the long-term, even when they were hard choices.

• Taking time to struggle with yourself, kind of way

Getting to know who you are - your interests, strengths, weaknesses - is a struggle with the self. You need time, you need to really try, you need to suck a lot then a little and you need the thick skin to keep going.

You need to teach yourself that you can do hard things too, I guess. You learn to trust yourself, you learn to be honest with yourself, you learn to like yourself.

Our inner worlds becomes our outer… and so day by day… I began to look more and more like myself :)

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Month-in-review, October

Brrr a sweet little monthly wrap-up.

Wearing this skirt a lot, and have a lot of love for this strippy striped top

Eating and baking lots of banana bread (this recipe is gr8), these vitamins, and these ones

Reading (and recommend)

• Butter by Asako Yuzuki

Have you tried rice with butter & soy sauce? Illuminating. Does weight gain = self love and liberation? Yuzuki said, good question, let’s explore it.

• Is the algorithm making us LESS stylish, LESS interesting, LESS...ourselves?

• How to be perceived on club reticent

• Me at 33 on

  Sundaze Book Café

• The Week I was Caviar Rich on

  early girl

Watching (and recommend) Where the Crawdad Sings & Triangle of Sadness

Hyperfixating on these outrageous pyjamas & my new elastin serum (it’s good!)

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For your viewing pleasure, Galerie Tiger

Some recent pinterest saves,

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Hey boo thank you for reading :) I hope this newsletter gave you a good return on your time invested 🫡

I (and my boyfriend slash proofreader slash photographer slash design editor) put a lot of love into these pieces.

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