You Don't Need Another Aesthetic, You Need a Personality

I’ve always found it interesting what humans choose to cling to amidst a life where everything is fleeting. People, places, music, and even objects. As I write this, I’m wearing one of those objects: a cheap pair of wired headphones I’ve grown so attached to that they’re basically built into my personality.

I bought them at Liverpool Street Station the day my AirPods tragically died of old age. I couldn’t stomach the thought of making my nightly commute without a soundtrack accompanying my steps, so I went to the tiny convenience store and asked the cashier to unlock the tech case.

Two minutes and nineteen pounds later, I was standing at the crosswalk with a ripped-open box in my hands and Lorde in my ears.

Thank God.

I have to admit, the wire gets annoying at times, and the sound is a little fuzzy around the edges. But I have yet to purchase new AirPods. I mean, why would I choose headphones from a bleak Amazon warehouse over the ones I hand-selected at a train station and traveled across an ocean with?

In a similar vein, the passcode on my phone is still the name of my favorite musician from when I was fifteen. Are they still my number one artist? No. But there’s no point in changing a letter combination that’s practically muscle memory. Likewise, my favorite drink is still the exact kind of tea my grandmother served me when I was ten years old. If you know me, you know my cabinets are always overflowing with Earl Grey.

My life is filled with patterns and mannerisms I’ve picked up from friends, family, and even strangers, and this stretches far beyond train stations and tea choices.

This collecting of habits and ideas is a subconscious practice, but also a lost art.

I’m part of a generation that worships aesthetics. We pluck people off the street and place them into boxes labeled things like "clean girl" and "cottagecore."

It makes sense, honestly. In a world filled with chaos and uncertainty, it feels comforting to organize ourselves into neatly packaged identities. The hardest part is choosing one. But once you do, it seems like you're set for life.

As long as you slick your hair back, wear pastels, and put on chunky gold hoops, the clean girl label won’t lose its grip.

Except, after a while, the novelty fades. And so does our sense of self. I mean, what does "clean girl" even mean? And is it really possible to build an entire identity around it? I’ve certainly seen brands and influencers try. And I have to admit, it’s a little unsettling to scroll through feeds filled with a kind of dystopian cohesion that is not only unattainable, but also pretty damn boring.

As much as social media tries to convince us otherwise, humans are not one-dimensional creatures with singular interests. From the outside, aesthetics can look like protection, a sense of order in a world shouting assumptions and stereotypes at us from every direction. The concept of belonging is irresistible to a society starved of stability.

But at its core, aesthetics are deeply rooted in consumerism, fueled by the pressure to reinvent ourselves and "glow up" in order to be worthy of being seen. And while the chains binding people to archetypes technically constitute a form of connection, they are not community.

A Y2K girl won’t be offered an unhinged playlist full of songs outside the 2000s, and a dark academic won’t be forgiven for wearing something outside their carefully curated colour palette. When you step into a box, it can feel like you're stuck there, the door locking quickly behind you. Any attempt to escape can be interpreted as failure or, even worse, social displacement.

But refusing to open yourself up to anything beyond a chosen niche limits your life exponentially.

Not only that, it causes people to erase the most vibrant and interesting parts of themselves. I would know, because like most young people searching for a solid sense of purpose, I lived it.

In 2020, I wanted to be a tiny pink Pilates girl so. freaking. bad.

My TikTok For You Page was filled with diet plans and Chloe Ting workouts (the background music still haunts me). But at the end of the day, it didn’t matter how many extra-small workout sets I tried to squeeze myself into or how many calories I deprived myself of to get visible abs. I was still me: a girl so desperate for a sense of belonging that she would do anything, and lose everything, to become someone else entirely.

Do I consider myself a Pilates girl? Sometimes. But I’m also a scrappy artist who writes poetry between bites of cake, leaving sugary fingerprints shamelessly smudged across notebook pages. I blast Charli XCX while putting on my makeup in the morning and listen to Fleetwood Mac on my evening walks. My wardrobe spans everything from tailored suits to ruffled skirts, and my bookshelf holds both Emily Dickinson and Emily Henry.

I’m no longer a "Pilates girl." I’m just a girl who does Pilates. And I truly believe this is the reality for most people. It’s just not what we see online. Nor is it particularly admired. It doesn’t fit the "personal brand" we’re supposedly meant to be building, or the aesthetic categories we're expected to commit ourselves to.

The thing is, we think these aesthetics will save us. If we contort ourselves just right, we’ll finally fit in. We’ll finally have a place to call home. Somewhere to go when we’re lost and something to say when the world asks us who we are.

I can’t think of anything more tragic.

We sacrifice so much of ourselves when we stay trapped inside a box. As a creative, I’ve always been taught to think outside of one. But as a person, I’ve often felt much safer sitting inside four walls with a neatly labeled door.

Stepping outside the box is often seen as controversial because you're doing something radical: taking up space. Many people are uncomfortable with that, especially when you're a woman. But it is also the only way to become the fullest and most authentic version of yourself.

This is what I like to call the mosaic. It’s a deeply countercultural idea because the beauty of a mosaic is that nothing matches perfectly. It’s a collision of colors, sounds, textures, and tastes.

It’s overwhelming. It's messy. And yet, unlike carefully curated boxes, it makes people stop and stare.

Imagine that? Making someone pause in this fast-paced, oversaturated world. Pretty insane.

So I’m going to hold tightly to the parts of myself that didn’t originate from a vision board.

The parts stitched together through moments of genuine human connection. Like the Uber driver who taught me how to meditate. Or the librarian who recommended a book outside my usual genre and changed my life.

Mosaics taste like whiskey sours and chocolate croissants. They look like wearing your wedding dress to a rave. They sound like symphonies playing in a dive bar. Mosaics are contradictory. They lack cohesion.

But they don’t need it. Because life was never about matching. It was always about moments.

Mismatched and tangled, like a pair of wired headphones playing the song your best friend once said made her feel like she could fly. You think of her on the commute home, your sneakers hidden beneath business casual because, even though you work in an office, high heels never spoke to you the way your New Balances do.

You sit on the train and feel the world stretch out before you. And with it, you fill the space.

You think about your room at home. The posters on the walls. The ticket stubs tucked into drawers. The photographs scattered across your desk. The shelves lined with vinyl records and CDs. When you walk through the door, you're surrounded by all the people and places you've loved. And perhaps even more miraculous, they loved you right back. They sprinkled pieces of themselves into your life until it became unmistakably yours.

You see, we were never built to fit into boxes.

We were always meant to fill them.