I talk a lot about thrifting. I thrift a lot, I keep a lot of hand-me-downs, and more than half of my closet is made up of secondhand clothing. So you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I don’t love buying fast fashion.

But you might be surprised to learn that I still do.

I’ve been watching YouTube as my primary source of entertainment for years and years now. Fashion YouTube, vlogs, video podcasts, commentary YouTubers—I love all of it. And one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that YouTubers can very easily get themselves into a bit of a trap without realizing it.

If a vlogger mentions wanting to eat healthier or exercise more, as soon as they show a contradicting clip—say, them eating pizza three vlogs later—people are quick to point it out.

“I thought you said you were going to eat healthier.”

If a homemaking vlogger talks a lot about sustainability and then shows herself using an unsustainable cleaning product in a non-refillable container, someone will notice.

And if a fashion YouTuber talks constantly about thrifting, buying good-quality pieces, and avoiding the fast trend cycle, it can be surprisingly jarring to see them wearing something from Zara or Urban Outfitters.

But why?

If a friend of mine who I’ve always known to be pretty sustainable and pretty anti-trends thinks something from H&M is cute and buys it, I don’t really think twice. She’s still the same person I thought she was.

But when a fashion YouTuber I’ve come to think of as sustainable and anti-trend picks up something from Zara, suddenly it feels like a contradiction. Sometimes it even feels like hypocrisy.

And I think the reason is that people on the internet are far more “branded” than we realize they are.

When you follow someone online for years, you develop an understanding of who they are. You know what they like, what they don’t like, what they believe in, what they buy, what they refuse to buy. Eventually, all of those little pieces of information start to form a person in your head.

But that person isn’t actually the whole person.

It’s a version of them. A collection of patterns you’ve observed. And because you’re seeing those patterns over and over again, it can start to feel like you’ve figured out their values.

This happens with everyone we follow online, but it’s especially pronounced with creators because their identity is, to some extent, part of their job.

A YouTuber’s personality, taste, lifestyle, opinions, and habits all become part of the public-facing version of them. Even when they’re not consciously trying to “brand” themselves, an audience is inevitably going to do it for them.

And once you’ve been categorized, it becomes harder to contradict the category.

This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. I’m not saying audiences are wrong for noticing inconsistencies, and I’m not saying creators are wrong for wanting to maintain a certain identity.

In fact, some consistency is probably a good thing. If someone builds their entire platform around ethical consumption and then turns around and promotes something they know is unethical because they’re getting paid to do it, I think it’s completely reasonable to question that.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the much more ordinary contradictions.

The sustainable person who occasionally buys something new.

The person who says they don’t like trends but falls in love with one.

The person who cares deeply about animal welfare but isn’t vegan.

The person who wants to eat healthier but orders pizza.

The person who loves thrifting but sometimes wants the $50 new version of something they could probably find secondhand if they spent another six hours looking.

In real life, we understand these contradictions intuitively.

People are fickle. People change their minds. People have competing priorities. People care about something deeply and then, sometimes, don’t care quite as much.

We don’t generally find this shocking.

But the internet has a strange way of turning those complicated people into much simpler characters.

And once someone has become a character in our heads, we expect them to behave consistently with the character.

The internet turns people into brands, and then we become uncomfortable when they behave like people.

I think this is one of the stranger side effects of being a person online.

It also creates a weird incentive for creators. If you know that your audience has decided you’re a “sustainable fashion person,” you might become less inclined to show the moments when you’re not being particularly sustainable.

Not necessarily because you’re being dishonest. Maybe you just don’t want to deal with the comments.

So you don’t show the Zara purchase.

You don’t mention the time you bought something because you liked it, even though you knew you could probably have found something similar secondhand.

You don’t talk about the thing that doesn’t quite fit with the version of yourself you’ve established online.

And eventually, the audience sees an increasingly consistent version of you—not because you’re actually that consistent, but because you’ve learned which parts of yourself are easiest to show.

I think this is part of why the internet can sometimes feel much more black-and-white than real life.

There are people who are genuinely and consistently passionate about sustainable fashion. There are people who never buy new clothes. There are people who have made sustainability a major part of their lives and would feel genuinely uncomfortable compromising on it.

But I don’t think most people are like that in every area of their lives.

And I don’t think they need to be.

I was vegan for four years. At the time, it was something I really believed in. But there was a toxic culture in some vegan spaces where people would attack vegetarians for not going all the way, attack other vegans for slipping up, and attack former vegans for adding eggs back into their diets.

And it eventually struck me how stupid that was.

If the goal is to make the world more sustainable and more friendly to animals, we’d probably accomplish more by convincing a meat-eater to cut their meat consumption in half than by convincing a vegetarian to become vegan.

In other words, the world would be better if everyone made a few imperfect changes than if a small group of already highly committed people became perfectly consistent.

The same principle applies to fashion.

There are plenty of alternatives to buying fast fashion. You can thrift. You can borrow. You can mend. You can buy fewer things. You can save for something better.

All of those are worth doing.

But I don’t think that means you need an airtight moral justification every time you don’t.

Sometimes you just don’t feel like spending another three months looking for the perfect secondhand version of a basic tank top.

Sometimes you already know you like the ones from Gap.

Sometimes you see something for $20 that looks remarkably similar to the $100 version and you buy it.

I’m not saying that’s the best thing to do. Fast fashion is still a deeply messed-up industry. The fact that it’s understandable doesn’t make it good.

But I also don’t think we need to pretend that making the better choice every single time is the only morally acceptable way to participate in the world.

And if you’re someone like me who tends to beat yourself up for not being perfectly moral or sustainable in every area of your life, I think it’s worth remembering that it is normal not to always do the best thing.

There is a difference between wanting to do better and demanding perfection from yourself.

There is also a difference between encouraging people toward better choices and demanding that they construct their entire identity around those choices.

I worry that the latter can sometimes become counterproductive.

If someone who normally buys secondhand occasionally buys a new sweater, I would much rather that person continue thrifting most of the time than decide that because they aren’t doing it perfectly, there’s no point trying.

If someone who eats meat starts eating less of it, I’d rather encourage that than tell them that unless they’re willing to go fully vegan, their efforts don’t count.

And if someone who loves fashion starts thinking more carefully about what they buy—even if they still occasionally buy fast fashion—I think that’s a worthwhile change.

We don’t need to turn every imperfect improvement into a moral failure.

Maybe this is why I’ve become increasingly wary of the pressure to have a perfectly coherent personal brand.

Because the more certain we become about who we’re supposed to be, the more we have to hide the evidence that we’re actually human.

We can love thrifting and still buy something new.

We can care about sustainability and still get lazy.

We can hate the idea of trends and still fall for one.

We can want to be better people without pretending that we’ve already become the idealized version of ourselves.

And maybe, more importantly, we can allow other people to be inconsistent too.

Because real people are not branded in real life.

To quote Walt Whitman—yes, this is extremely pretentious, but I’m going to do it anyway:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I think the internet could use a little more of that.

Just a little more room for people to be complicated.

To change their minds.

To care deeply about something and still fail at it sometimes.

To contain multitudes.

And, occasionally, to buy the fast fashion sweater.

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The popular all-white interior aesthetic of the 2010s is getting shat upon left and right these days. The lack of variety feels void of personality at best, and jarringly sterile at worst. When you want a home that is all one tone, it becomes increasingly important to introduce a breadth of textures, materials, shapes, and sizes.

But I’m not here to harp on this realization that has become so agreed upon in recent years that it’s almost cliché.

I’m here to make an argument for why using neutral paint, furniture, rugs, and curtains can be the perfect base for someone who wants to honor the beautiful colors of the world intentionally in their home.

My sister and I have been collecting rocks and sea glass every summer at the lake for as long as we could walk. We are somehow equally enthralled with the subtly luminous hues that make a few lucky rocks stand out from the rest of the pebbles that populate the waterline.

Our routine was the same every year.

We’d turn into little beachcombers and take turns walking in front of and behind each other. It was the only way to make sure the search was fair. And at the end of the week, we’d sit across from each other on the deck with a bucket of water between us, dip our pebbles so that their hues would come alive, and sort them by tone and color. The result was a calculated but organic grid of stones — only the brightest from the beach.

In those moments, it was always amazing how satisfyingly vibrant a pile of rocks could seem.

But something sad happened almost every year. We’d proudly pile that week’s collection into a jar, take it home, and display it in our bedrooms. But suddenly, that stunningly vibrant collection no longer shone the way it did on the deck. In our bright childhood bedrooms, it just looked like a jar of normal rocks.

We thought maybe it was because they were dry, so we filled the jar with water, covering all the stones and restoring them to their full vivid potential. But they just looked like a jar of wet normal rocks. A little bit darker, maybe a bit richer, but nothing close to the beauty we were convinced we had beheld at the lake just a few days prior.

It has taken me an embarrassing number of years to figure out why that was. And the epiphany came in a slightly backwards way. I inadvertently reverse-engineered the solution to this very serious, lifelong rock problem. And it happened when I was painting my pantry just last month.

My apartment that I moved into at the beginning of this year is painted all white. The floors are hardwood, the radiators are black, the windowsills are grey stone, the windowpanes are black. Even the air conditioners are two-toned brown window units from the 70s. The outlet covers are beige plastic. The place is a sea of neutrals.

I planned to add some color through furniture and decor, but before even doing that, I wanted to freshen up my pantry.

Like the rest of the house, it was white, but it collected crumbs and clearly hadn’t been deep cleaned before I moved in. There was what looked to be some sort of brownish-red sappy substance dripping down parts of the walls. There were cracks in the ceiling, and chips in the paint.

Because it was so gross, and I had been confronted by how well food and other gunk shows up on white walls, I decided I wanted it to be a bit darker in there.

Nothing crazy, just a mid-tone neutral instead of a bright white.

I chose what I would have described as “beige” for the walls, and a “slightly darker greyish beige” for the accordion shutter-style doors.

When I rolled the first coat of paint on, I couldn’t believe what my corneas were processing. The walls looked baby poop yellow. I turned off the artificial light, and it looked a little bit better, so I kept going.

I painted the doors with the aforementioned grey-ish beige paint, and much to my dismay, it came out teal.

The pantry that was supposed to be totally neutral was now the colorful accent room of my house.

I looked at the paint swatches, and they still looked natural to me. I held them up to the painted walls, and they were a perfect match.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they were bright yellow and bright turquoise. They were very muted versions of what they were. But their undertones were impossible to ignore now that they were all over the walls, in the context of my white and brown and black and grey house.

I ended up loving the pantry, but that’s beside the point of this story.

I realized that if I had gone into a brightly colored, quirky, maximalist home and painted those same two colors in there, they would read extremely muted. In my house, they were the accent colors.

The context of a color matters just as much, if not more, than the color itself.

I always thought that the same paint color could look different in different spaces because of the lighting. Maybe natural light makes things look cooler, artificial light makes them look warmer, etc. But it somehow didn’t occur to me that the accompanying tones could have an even more extreme effect on our perception.

That’s when I thought of the color-chart-thing I remembered seeing in psychology class.

In 1824, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul was working as the director of dyes at the Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory in Paris. Weavers were complaining that certain black threads looked muddy or tinted red or blue when woven next to other bright colors. Chevreul tested the chemistry of the dyes and found absolutely nothing wrong with them.

He realized the problem was entirely an optical illusion caused by the placement of the colors. In 1839, he published that sh*t in a book called The Laws of Contrast of Color.

So, as it turned out, I was about two centuries late to this realization.

It made sense that, if this optical illusion was pissing off weavers back in the day, it’s still having the same effect on interior designers everywhere.

But instead of Simultaneous Contrast existing only as an annoying inconsistency in design, I think it can be harnessed as a powerful tool, too.

Of course even the most colorful rocks on the beach looked drab compared to my baby blue room. Of course that jar looked like a sad pile of gravel among the bright man-made knickknacks on my shelves.

But they looked glorious on the old brown deck at the cottage by the lake.

There are special objects all around us, both natural and man-made, whose humble colors deserve to stand out and be appreciated in the home.

We spent hours — probably collective days — of our lives searching the shore for the most beautiful rocks we could find. We collected them because of their colors. And to lose the colors of my childhood summers to the bright walls of a room claiming to hate neutrals is both ironic and weirdly heartbreaking.

You can love color even when it isn’t bright. You can love it because it’s natural. You can love it for its subtlety.

Little objects with muted colors and tiny speckled gem tones can become an entire room’s rich focal point, catching your gaze and inviting you to look closer.

Or they can fade away, engulfed by a space that’s been drenched with synthetic pigment for the sake of manufactured personality.

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I feel like I’m always late to trends.

Not just that it takes me a little longer to hear about them since I don’t have TikTok — like, it takes me six months to a year to warm up to almost every trend after I first hear about it.

And if you’re like me in this respect, I think you can look at it a few ways.

You could get frustrated that you’re always behind and that it seemingly takes you longer to catch up to where all the other fashion people are.

You could assume that this means the trend just isn’t part of your personal style, and therefore shouldn’t be a part of your wardrobe anyway.

Or you could zoom out of your chronically online fashion brain for two seconds, be a normal person, and not read into it that much.

And I’m really talking to myself when I say this.

Because even though I outwardly question and sometimes scrutinize trend culture, I definitely still fall victim to some of the toxic parts of it.

Like, I will genuinely not be that into a new trend, and then six months to a year later, I’ll start to like it. And even though I really like this thing now, my brain will tell me that it’s not worth buying because I’m late to the trend.

Either it’s not worth it because it’s going to go out soon, or it’s not worth it because I’m going to look stupid for being excited about a purchase that everyone else made so long ago.

And when you say it out loud, it’s pretty clear how dumb and twisted that thinking is. But I think all of us can fall victim to it, no matter how much we think we don’t care about looking trendy, or “in the know,” or up to speed with fashion.

And when I think deeply about why this bothers me so much, at least in my case, it really comes down to wanting to be taken seriously.

I’ve said it before, but I’ve loved fashion and clothes for quite literally my entire life. At the same time, I’ve always had a pretty simple style, and I’ve always regarded a lot of my friends as having better and cooler style than me.

So even though I really wanted to make fashion videos on YouTube for so long, I was always worried that I wasn’t worthy of it. Or that I wasn’t going to be taken seriously because of how normal I am, and how much cooler I think other people’s style is than my own.

I was worried that if I didn’t look like the kind of person who had uniquely good taste, people wouldn’t believe that I actually did.

And when I did start making fashion videos, I had to consciously resist the temptation to change my style in order to fit what I thought would be received well. To dress in a way that I thought would be more interesting, more fashionable, or more worthy of being looked up to.

But deep down, I knew that the people I like watching the most on YouTube are actually very relatable and very obviously honest about what they like and don’t like.

Most people I watch on YouTube aren’t girls whose style I necessarily want to emulate. They’re girls whose way of thinking about fashion inspires me.

And that distinction has become really important to me.

I don’t necessarily want to watch someone because I want to look exactly like them. I want to watch someone because they make me think about clothes differently. They make me notice something I hadn’t noticed before, or question something I thought I already knew.

So ultimately, I knew I needed to just be myself, and that would be the most relatable and, in the end, the most rewarding way to make fashion videos.

But trendy fashion culture really still curses me in both ways.

I still fall victim to feeling subpar if I’m late to trends or don’t have the “coolest” style. But I also try so hard to reject trend culture that I end up getting self-conscious when I do wear something trendy.

I try so hard to only wear what I genuinely like and NOT fall into subscribing to all the trends, that I sometimes end up getting confused about what my own opinions even are.

And there’s always been a part of me that thinks being late to trends and buying a trendy piece eight months late is a lose-lose situation.

Because I’m like, well, I’m subscribing to a trend. I’m giving in to this trendy fashion culture and not challenging the norm. But I’m doing it late, so I don’t even get to look like I’m on the leading edge of fashion. I’m just going to look like a follower who doesn’t think for herself anyway.

And again, that’s just me thinking way too hard about it now that I’m putting myself out there in that way.

Because if I’m early to a trend, maybe I’m just following trends too closely.

But if I’m late, I’m a follower.

If I don’t participate, maybe my style isn’t cool enough.

If I do participate, maybe I’m not original enough.

There’s really no winning.

But what I’m starting to realize is that being late to trends is actually kind of a win-win situation.

If you really like a trend even after you’ve been seeing it everywhere for eight months, that’s a pretty good testament to the fact that you genuinely like the piece itself.

You like how it looks. You still want it even without the little ego boost that comes from being one of the first people to have it.

All things considered, I think there’s something kind of useful about having that much time to decide.

Because if you’ve been seeing something for months and months and you still want it, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not just excited because it’s new. You’ve had plenty of time to realize that you want to be part of the trend, and you’ve still decided that you just want the thing.

You just like it.

And you’re probably less likely to get sick of it after three wears because you’ve already had eight months of seeing it everywhere and you still haven’t gotten sick of it.

And if you ARE one of those people who likes to challenge trend culture and dress outside of it, perfect. Your trendy piece will no longer be peak trendy soon anyway, and you can confidently keep wearing it knowing that you’re making your own choice and not following the crowd.

So maybe being late isn’t actually such a bad thing.

You guys are either going to be right there with me in this thought process or you’re going to look at me and be like… what is wrong with you.

But I think this level of overthinking is actually pretty common in any sort of creative endeavor — especially when that creative endeavor is a form of self-expression.

And fashion is one of the most overt and obvious examples of self-expression.

I’m not saying it’s more creative or more valid than other forms of self-expression. I just mean that dressing yourself is a very literal, overt example of choosing how you want to be perceived in the world.

So as silly as it seems to think this hard and this deeply about what you want to wear, I actually think it’s pretty valid to be picky and want to express yourself accurately.

Especially when it costs money to buy clothes. If I’m going to spend $150 on a pair of shoes, I want to feel like I’m buying them because I actually love them — not because I’m trying to prove that I have good taste, or because I feel like I’m supposed to own them because everyone else does.

And maybe that’s the part I’m still figuring out.

I don’t think the goal is to stop caring about trends. I don’t even think there’s anything wrong with wanting to look fashionable.

I think the goal is just to get a little better at separating I like this from I like that I like this.

Because those are two very different things.

And maybe being eight months late to a trend isn’t evidence that I have bad taste, or that I’m behind, or that I’m not fashionable enough.

Maybe it’s actually one of the best ways to find out that I really do like something.

Maybe being late isn’t the problem.

Maybe it’s the proof.

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The more money you spend on an outfit, the more important it becomes that nobody can tell. And there is perhaps no faster way to make an outfit less impressive online than to reveal that someone got paid to wear it.

Fashion influencers are expected to look good for a living, but somehow they’re not supposed to look like they got paid for it. The clothes can be beautiful, the styling can be impeccable, and the outfit can be completely in line with everything we’ve previously admired about their taste—but once we learn that the clothes were gifted, or that the person was paid to wear them, something about our perception can change.

Of course she looks good. She’s getting paid to.

It’s a strange response. We don’t generally consider someone’s taste less legitimate because they had access to better tools or resources. But with fashion, there seems to be an expectation that good taste should exist somewhat independently of money.

We want you to have taste. We just don’t want to see the money behind it.

This is why a $20 thrifted jacket can be evidence of excellent style, while a $2,000 designer jacket can be evidence that you have too much money.

And yet, if that $2,000 jacket is obscure enough, well-made enough, and logo-free enough, it can suddenly become evidence of excellent taste again.

The difference isn’t necessarily how much the person spent. It’s what we think the money says about them.

We seem to have developed an entire aesthetic system for determining which kinds of wealth are tasteful.

You can spend a lot of money. Just don’t look like you spent a lot of money.

A beautifully cut wool coat with no visible logo is sophisticated. A giant logo across the chest is tacky. A $1,500 leather bag that looks like an unremarkable leather bag is an investment. A $1,500 bag covered in recognizable branding can be a status symbol.

The more expensive something is, the more impressive it can become if you can make the price invisible.

This is part of the appeal of “quiet luxury,” but I think it goes beyond that trend. There is something deeply satisfying, at least within online fashion culture, about finding the expensive thing that doesn’t announce itself as expensive. It becomes a kind of secret knowledge.

I know this is good. I know this is expensive. And I know you can’t immediately tell.

That seems much more fashionable than simply wanting other people to know that you can afford it. Which makes me wonder: are we actually opposed to wealth in fashion, or are we opposed to visible wealth?

Because if that’s the case, the hierarchy gets strange.

The person who spends $5,000 on a coat that looks like it could have cost $200 can be praised for their taste.

The person who spends $200 on a coat that looks like it cost $5,000 can be criticized for trying too hard.

And the person who spends $20 on a vintage coat that looks like it cost $2,000 can be treated like they’ve won the fashion lottery.

We don’t just admire the result. We admire the relationship to money that we imagine produced the result.

This is where thrifting becomes especially interesting.

Thrifting has become one of the most fashionable ways to spend very little money. And for good reason: vintage clothing can be more distinctive, better made, more sustainable, and less tied to whatever trend the algorithm is currently pushing.

But there is also a particular cultural prestige attached to being good at thrifting.

Finding the perfect leather jacket for $15 isn’t just owning a cool leather jacket. It’s evidence that you know where to look. You have patience. You have an eye. You can recognize value where other people couldn’t.

The low price becomes part of the story. And that’s what makes it so different from buying a $15 shirt from a fast-fashion website.

Both are inexpensive. But one suggests resourcefulness, while the other can suggest convenience. One suggests individuality, while the other can suggest trend-chasing. One suggests that you found something the rest of us overlooked, while the other suggests that you bought something because thousands of other people were buying it too.

The price is the same. The meaning isn’t.

I have a pair of vintage red and brown leather cowgirl boots that I wear almost every day. Whether they’re part of an actual styled outfit or just thrown on over my sweatpants and sleep top, they find a way to my feet at least 300 days out of the year.

One day I popped into an independently owned little shoe store that’s been here in Pittsburgh for decades. The man working there looked at my boots, asked me how much I paid for them, and stared at them, puzzled, when I answered, “$180.”

I thought he was judging me for paying so much for an old, worn pair of essentially work boots. But he looked back up and said, “Those are like an $800–900 pair of boots.” He’d been in the industry for over forty years.

This only intensified my obsession with them.

They were the only pair in the consignment shop. They were in my size. I found them, and I had good enough intuition to trust that they were well worth 180 of my precious dollars.

The man in the shoe store knew something I didn’t—and now I feel like I know something that everyone else doesn’t. I’m in on it.

I’m in on how much these vintage boots are worth, how rare it was for me to find them, and how good my taste must be to have chosen to buy them.

These boots mean so much more to me than another $180 pair of boots I bought new from a popular brand.

The price is the same. The meaning isn’t.

And then there are designer dupes, which create another strange contradiction.

For years, one of the biggest criticisms of designer fashion was that it was inaccessible. If you loved the shape of a designer bag but couldn’t afford it, the existence of a cheaper version was supposed to be a good thing. But now even that has become complicated.

We can criticize someone for following designers because “money doesn’t equal style.” But we can also criticize someone for buying the cheaper imitation because they’re participating in the same status system—profiting from and reproducing designs whose original value comes partly from their exclusivity.

We want fashion to be accessible. But we also want it to be original.

We want people to reject status symbols. But we also want them to recognize quality.

We want people to spend less. But we don’t want them to buy cheaply made things.

We want people to look expensive. But we don’t want them to look like they’re trying to look expensive.

At some point, it starts to feel less like a question of money and more like a complicated moral code for how money should appear on the body.

Maybe that’s why the relationship between class and fashion is so difficult to untangle.

We tend to imagine that fashion works in an obvious class hierarchy: expensive is good, cheap is bad; rich people have access to better clothes, and therefore look better.

But online fashion culture seems to have inverted that hierarchy.

The person with less money can actually receive more fashion credit for looking good.

There is something especially impressive about someone who manages to dress beautifully without spending much. The less they appear to have had to work with, the more talented they seem.

Meanwhile, someone with unlimited resources can almost be robbed of the opportunity to impress us. If they look good, perhaps they just had access to good clothes.

It’s almost as though we want to see evidence that someone’s taste exists independently of their purchasing power.

And honestly, I understand that impulse.

It’s genuinely satisfying to discover that style doesn’t require a huge budget. Fashion can be creative, resourceful, and personal. You can have incredible taste without being wealthy. You can find beauty in secondhand clothing, alter things yourself, wear something for twenty years, or make an outfit out of things other people overlooked.

Those are good things to value.

But I wonder if we’ve taken the idea a little too far. Because sometimes it feels as though we’re no longer just evaluating what someone is wearing.

We’re evaluating whether they have earned the right to look good in it.

A person with very little money wearing fast fashion may be judged differently from a person with plenty of money doing the exact same thing.

A wealthy person buying something cheaply can be criticized for being unsustainable when they have the resources to be more selective. A less wealthy person buying something cheaply might be given more grace, because we don’t like to pretend that everyone has the same choices available to them.

And a wealthy person buying something expensive can be praised if the expense is hidden behind quality, while criticized if the expense is visible through branding or status.

So where exactly does the fashionability come from?

Maybe it’s somewhere on a sliding scale between money, quality, and sustainability.

Less money + more sustainability + higher quality = exceptional taste.

More money + less sustainability + lower quality = terrible style.

But money by itself doesn’t seem to determine where something lands.

It’s the relationship between those things.

And perhaps that’s because we aren’t actually trying to eliminate class from fashion. We couldn’t, even if we wanted to. Fashion is an industry built around production, consumption, labor, scarcity, craftsmanship, branding, and status. Money is embedded in almost every decision we make about clothing.

We just prefer not to see it.

And I’m absolutely a cog in this machine, too.

I don’t think I would be as obsessed with my red and brown boots if I had nonchalantly paid full price for them. The surprise frugality of the purchase made them feel more impressive to me, and therefore, more fashionable.

They’re worth money. They don’t look much like it. And I didn’t spend much to get them.

Ah, exceptional taste.

Maybe the real contradiction is that we don’t want to believe that money has anything to do with taste, but we constantly use our assumptions about money to decide how much taste someone has.

We admire the person who can make $50 look like $500.

We admire the person who can make $500 look like $50.

And maybe, above all, we admire the person who makes us forget there was money involved at all.

I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing.

There are plenty of good reasons to value sustainability, craftsmanship, individuality, and resourcefulness. There are plenty of good reasons to question conspicuous consumption and an industry that constantly encourages us to buy more.

But I do think it’s worth noticing when those values start becoming aesthetic judgments.

Because maybe the most fashionable thing isn’t actually having less money.

Maybe it’s looking as though you could have had more money, but chose not to make that the point.

And maybe that’s why, in fashion, wealth is only chic when you can’t see it.

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But that idea has one fundamental problem: clothing has to be worn by a person.

A dress can exist without a body, but its full aesthetic effect cannot. The moment you put it on, it becomes part of a body. Its proportions change. Its shape changes. The way it moves changes. And, inevitably, our perception of it changes.

Which means that fashion can never really escape the question of beauty.

Even people who reject conventional beauty standards are making a decision about beauty. Someone who deliberately dresses in a way that is unflattering according to conventional standards is still engaging with the idea of what is flattering. Someone who rejects the beauty industry is still standing directly in the middle of a conversation about beauty.

I’ve heard people who insist that body type shouldn’t matter in fashion also claim that “low-rise jeans coming back is not inclusive because they ‘don’t work’ on all body types.” The language of inclusivity still assumes that clothing ought to work equally well on every body, which is itself a beauty-oriented framework.

I started thinking about this when I noticed how often we try (and fail) to separate the two.

Pinterest, for example, has a feature that allows you to filter your search results by body type. There is a kind of dark humor in the way that our bodies can now be categorized in the same way we categorize aesthetics: cottage-core, mid-century modern, quiet luxury, pear-shaped.

We have become very comfortable asking the internet not only “What should I wear?” but “What kind of body do I have, and what does that mean I should wear?”

Fashion advice has historically been full of this kind of thinking: dress for your body type, balance your proportions, hide this, emphasize that, create the illusion of a waist, elongate your legs.

The underlying assumption was that the body is a problem to be solved by clothing.

And then came the backlash.

One of the most familiar refrains of the body-positive era in fashion has been some variation of: “Is it a ‘fit, or is she just skinny?”

The idea is supposed to challenge the assumption that certain clothes only look good on thin bodies. But there’s something strange about even that.

Because underneath the argument is another assumption: that clothes looking good on a thin body is the obvious, default outcome.

That the skinny woman obviously looks good in the clothes, and the question is just whether the clothes are responsible for it, or if her body is.

Once again, thinness is framed as an unfair advantage, looking attractive is assumed as the goal, and body size finds its way into both the problem and the solution of a seemingly progressive thought.

A movement trying to liberate fashion from beauty standards can end up spending an enormous amount of time talking about beauty standards.

And maybe that’s unavoidable.

Because beauty and fashion aren’t simply two aesthetic elements that happen to work well together. In many cases, we actually pit them against each other.

Those touting that “dressing to look snatched is ruining your outfit” are essentially arguing that an outfit isn’t fashionable if it’s too flattering.

Or, if someone attractive is in an interesting outfit, we might immediately try to separate the two:

“Her outfit isn’t even that good. She just looks good because she’s hot.”

But what would it mean for an outfit to look good without the person wearing it?

We seem to want fashion criticism to operate like an objective measurement.

Is the silhouette good? Are the proportions right? Is the color combination interesting? Is the styling successful?

But none of those things exist independently of the person wearing them.

A pair of pants can be objectively well-made. A jacket can have beautiful construction. A fabric can be extraordinary.

But whether a full outfit is flattering, cool, sexy, awkward, elegant, strange, or beautiful depends, at least partly, on the body moving through it.

And this is where I think our obsession with separating beauty from fashion gets especially strange.

We don’t want to admit that someone’s shape or size or coloring has an impact on the effect of an outfit. We don’t want to admit how much someone’s body affects our perception of whether an outfit is “good.”

We would rather believe that we’re looking at the clothes alone.

There have been times when I see a beautiful person wearing an interesting outfit, and I challenge myself to think about whether I would still like the outfit if it were on me, or someone else, or if it looks good because of the person wearing it. And, to be honest, sometimes I don’t think it would look as good on someone else.

I regularly gawk at Verona Ferrell’s outfit choices. But her red curly hair, tall figure, and fair skin give her a completely different visual starting point than I have. Her outfit might not work on me the same way it does on her.

But it’s not because of a quantifiable level of attractiveness. It’s because just like garments, human beings have different shapes, coloring, movement qualities and energy. And the relationship between the qualities of the clothing and those of the wearer is what makes up what we know as fashion.

Maybe the problem isn’t that beauty has infiltrated fashion.

Maybe beauty was always part of fashion.

Fashion is, in part, the art of putting things on bodies and seeing what happens. Of course the body matters. Of course beauty matters.

The interesting question isn’t whether a garment looks good on a body in some objective, universal sense. It’s what happens when this person wears this garment.

Elegant, awkward, sexy, unbothered: these can all be successful effects of different fits on different shapes. Different colors can create different effects on different complexions. Different silhouettes can interact differently with different facial features. There are infinite versions of “flattering,” and not all of them are trying to achieve the same thing.

I’m starting to believe we should take some advice from the interior design world: More effective outcomes are created when you prioritize creating a feeling over an aesthetic.

In interior design, we don’t generally ask:
“Is this room objectively beautiful?”

We ask things like:

Does it feel warm?
Does it feel lived-in?
Does it feel dramatic?
Does it feel peaceful?
Does it feel like the person who lives here?

In fashion, flattering is one narrow metric that can obscure a much larger question of whether an outfit creates an interesting feeling. And there is no doubt that the actual person wearing it contributes so much to whatever that feeling ends up being.

We spend so much time trying to determine whether fashion makes us beautiful, whether beauty makes fashion look better, and whether we can somehow evaluate the clothes without including the person wearing them in the big picture.

I’m not sure we can. And I’m increasingly convinced that we shouldn’t have to.

Because fashion isn’t a collage of flat lays. It’s the relationship between a garment and a person.

And beauty is already there.

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At any given moment, we can see thousands of outfits worn by thousands of people from every corner of the world. We can save them, categorize them, analyze them, recreate them, and build an entire visual vocabulary without ever leaving our homes.

And that access is… pretty incredible. The internet has introduced me to designers, styling ideas, and ways of dressing that I probably never would have encountered otherwise.

But there is a point where inspiration becomes noise.

When you’re constantly looking at other people’s interpretations of style, it becomes way too easy to lose track of your own.

The less time I spend consuming fashion online, the more I notice that my personal style becomes less trend-conscious, more intuitive, and — maybe most importantly — more connected to the world around me.

Clothing loses its relationship to context when it exists primarily as an image.

Internet killed the centerfold star (& other real-life influencers)

Before fashion inspiration lived in a digital box, it was much more common to look through magazines, books, or simply observe the people around you. And there was value in the variety of those influences. They each honed our taste in different ways.

Fashion magazines and books have always been aspirational and, in many ways, avant-garde. But compared to a lot of online fashion today, they often feel surprisingly classic. The styling usually follows a certain logic: colors relate to each other, proportions balance, fabrics make sense together.

Meanwhile, a lot of online fashion has become centered around contrast.

The “wrong shoe theory” is a perfect example. Pairing delicate ballet flats with athletic clothing, or a romantic blouse with Adidas track pants, became interesting because it felt unexpected. It challenged the idea that certain things belonged together.

But because those ideas spread so quickly online, unexpected combinations have become… expected. The unusual pairing became the recognizable formula.

At a certain point, the thing that stands out is no longer the outfit that creates the most contrast. It’s the outfit where everything feels like it belongs together.

Now, when I look through older fashion imagery or see someone dressed in a way that feels intuitive and uncomplicated, it often catches my attention more than something designed specifically to surprise me.

Did you know… everyone in your 3D world gets dressed too?

One of the biggest fun-suckers of online fashion inspiration is that we unconsciously narrow our field of view to our own age and gender. But when we’re just existing in the world, it’s a lot easier for us to admire fashion from any kind of person, because it’s literally impossible to narrow our scope completely and handpick who we see in real life.

When you’re walking down the street, sitting at a restaurant, or standing in line somewhere, you don’t curate who you see. Your view includes people of every age, background, and relationship to fashion.

And some of the most interesting style inspiration often comes from people who would never consider themselves “fashionable.” Especially people who grew up before the internet existed to tell us what was cool. This isn’t because people who study fashion are less authentic. It’s because sometimes knowing too much about fashion can make us approach dressing analytically instead of instinctively.

There’s something fascinating about the way many older people dress because their outfits feel completely intuitive. They aren’t trying to recreate an image they saw online; they aren’t thinking about whether something will photograph well or whether it fits into a particular aesthetic.

They are simply getting dressed. They choose things because they like them, because they suit their life, and because they make sense for where they’re going. The guy wearing a perfectly broken-in jacket to buy groceries. The lady at the farmers market whose color-coordinated outfit looks like it has existed with her for twenty years.

Even if that person is into dressing funky, their specific flavor of funk came from years of simply knowing what they like — and it often still reflects a response to their environment.

It’s not always easy to tell the context behind the outfits we see online. So when our primary sources of inspiration come from the internet, we can lose sight of the importance of responding to context.

Getting dressed is not only about expressing yourself. It’s also about participating in your environment. Style is a conversation between you and your surroundings, and the internet often removes the surroundings.

Finding your way back to your pre-internet preferences

Something else I’ve noticed as I’ve stepped away from constant fashion inspiration is that my current taste often looks shockingly similar to the things I loved as a child.

The colors I’m drawn to, the materials that make me feel good, the silhouettes I naturally gravitate toward — so many of them connect back to the things I loved before I ever had access to endless images online. Before I knew what was trendy. Before I found out that being trendy was or wasn’t cool. Before I was comparing my taste to thousands of hot people all over the world.

When I was six or seven, I remember being asked what my favorite color was and responding with “brown.” Everyone laughed at me, but I had no idea why it was a funny or weird answer. I was thinking about my favorite tank top — and it was brown. I loved wearing brown tops with blue jeans. And today, that remains one of my favorite go-tos. I wasn’t trying to have a good or unique answer. I just liked brown.

We all have some amount of style intuition. Even as children, before we have the language to explain why we like something, we know what feels exciting and what feels like us.

Sometimes too much inspiration doesn’t help us discover our style. Sometimes it stifles us and drowns out our innate instincts.

The goal isn’t to stop looking

I’m not saying the answer is to reject online inspiration completely. I don’t even know if that would be possible, or even preferred!

I have gotten a lot of inspiration online that I really value. And I do appreciate the exposure to styles that I might never see in my daily life. But I do think there is value in creating space between ourselves and all of that input.

When we spend more time offline, our style becomes more intuitive. It responds more to our actual lives and less to the preferences rewarded online.

Maybe the biggest benefit is that we become more confident. When you aren’t constantly comparing your wardrobe to thousands of people online, you start trusting your own instincts again.

The more you trust your style intuition, the more authentic your personal style becomes.

And the more authentic your style becomes, the more aligned and secure you feel in it.

It becomes a cycle — one that begins when you stop looking 12 inches in front of you at a screen and start paying attention to the world happening around you.

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Of course, I wanted to say pink and green (with zebra stripe accents) because that’s what my sister was doing next door. But she would kill me, and even at the age of 7 I knew I couldn’t be that overt with my complete and utter adoration of her.

In true early 2000s fashion, we painted the four walls in my room light blue, light green, light blue, light green — respectively. My mom played her mixed CDs in my silver boom box and she let me use the roller if I promised to be careful and let her load the paint onto it first.

She had been mentally preparing herself to roll right over the Winnie the Pooh scenes she’d hand-painted in that room when Maddy was born. But I told her I wasn’t ready either, so we painted around them and used a sponge to soften the edges where the new paint met the atmosphere of Hundred Acre Wood.

While the paint dried, we sat on the floor among the furniture that was pushed into the middle of the room and sorted through every trinket and book on my shelves — one by one — deciding what to keep and what to let go.

My mom always guided us to be intentional with our belongings and to part with things that don’t hold value anymore — practical or sentimental. She sat with us through the process and acted as a listening ear, but didn’t dare make the decisions for us.

I kept the clay dinosaur I made in kindergarten art class. I donated some books I didn’t like the illustrations in. I kept all the Berenstain Bears stories and Maddy’s Junie B. Jones chapter books I was working up the courage to start reading. I donated my Slinky because we had a better one in the basement. I kept the plastic eagle that had its wings spread wide and was weighted in a way where you could balance it on your finger just by the beak — but I moved it to the bin under my bed ‘cause it wasn’t that cute to look at.

My dad moved the two twin beds out of the room, and I waved goodbye to the chapter of life where I’d slept 3 feet away from my sister every night.

Just a couple years prior, the summer before I was starting Kindergarten and Maddy was going into fourth grade, we spent a night in that room roleplaying with a soft light on when we should have been asleep.

I was terrified of getting on a school bus and going through the lunch line, but Maddy had told me that O’Hara elementary has spaghetti on the lunch menu two Wednesdays out of every month. So I couldn’t pack on those days.

My mom printed out the lunch menu calendar for the first month of school, circled the Spaghetti days, and taped it up in our bedroom.

On this night, my nerves were particularly active and I couldn’t fall asleep. Maddy flicked the lamp on, got out of bed, and told me to “Come ’ere, Pheeb.”

She explained how the lunch line works, pretended to be the lunch lady, and had me practice sliding an imaginary tray through the line and answering the questions I would be asked.

“Spaghetti.”

“Marinara.”

“Fruit juice.”

She explained the layout of the bus and promised me I could squeeze between her and our cousin Zoe on the first day.

When kindergarten started, I got embarrassed that I still said my Rs like Ws.

Laying side by side at night, staring at the ceiling but feeling each other’s company just across the 3 foot gap, I repeated after Maddy:

“Trrrrrrrrruck.”

“Trwrwrwuck.”

“Close!”

Seeing my new full bed dragged into that same room was the first time I’d ever felt profound loneliness and eager independence simultaneously.

Joy prevailed when we made my bed with my new blue and green polkadot duvet. My frog pillow matched it perfectly. I felt like a queen when I got into bed that night.

I made sure to sleep exactly in the middle, to capitalize on the space and feel an equal amount of excess on either side of me. Without Maddy there, I had made both of my parents check my windows to make sure they were locked. I was on the second floor in a notoriously safe neighborhood.

I had them leave a “crack open” in the pocket door so I could have some proof that the rest of the house still existed while I fell asleep.

“Crack open” became a phrase I repeated to whichever parent tucked me into bed each night as they left the room.

Because I had kept the Winnie the Pooh scenes on the walls, the sliding pocket door still had vines painted across it that I could look at while I monitored the open crack.

Only now do I realize how funny those words are.

That room held stories. If I close my eyes, I can still walk through it and find each one exactly where it happened.

Relics from my childhood live in my well-decorated memory palace.

I’ve loved designing spaces since 2006. Today, it means more to me than color and pattern and balance and contrast. It’s crafting the setting of tomorrow’s memories.

It’s knowing that if walls could talk, you’d hear them if you could remember what colors they wore and the little things they held.

It’s choosing to believe that world-building is just as important in your life’s story as writing the words.

When I’m old and grey, I might not remember the details of most ordinary days, but I’ll remember my blue and green walls. I’ll remember the Winnie the Pooh scenes that stayed up longer than they should have. I’ll remember asking my parents to leave the door “crack open.”

And I’ll remember the childhood bedroom where my sister taught me how to order spaghetti at school.

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I’ve experienced burnout a couple of times since starting YouTube in 2023. The first was after I had been vlogging my life every week for about 8 months. I was ringing in at around 550 subscribers. I was starting to get slightly antsy about my slow growth, but more than anything I felt like I was running out of things to document or talk about.

I thought that keeping my channel broad would help me never run out of ideas, but as it turned out, it’s harder to think of worthwhile things to talk about when the possibilities are THAT endless. And let’s be honest, I wasn’t going on exciting road trips or flying overseas every week of the year, and the appeal of filming myself getting coffee and going to the beach seemed to have a short shelf life.

Think about this: if a professor hands you a sheet of blank paper on the first day of class and says “write about anything for the next 20 minutes,” it is so much more intimidating than if they were to say “write down everything you remember about the first time you experienced nostalgia.”

Prompts and guidelines are often framed as restrictions, but they’re more like a door. A door lighting up in a room of 100 doors, taking off all of the pressure to choose which one to walk through.

So my first period of burnout was from that — standing in a room of 100 doors every week and not knowing which to open. I didn’t film for two months, still the longest break I’ve ever taken.

I knew I needed a consistent door with my name on it — one I actually had business walking through every week.

Okay, enough with the door metaphor. Basically, it was time to finally pick a niche.

As much as I wanted consistency with what I was creating, I was also really scared of losing the ability to f*ck around and try a bunch of stuff. When I was little, I remember always thinking to myself “when I have *insert job,* I’m going to do it this way.”

Ex: “When I’m a teacher, I’m gonna set up my classroom like a homey coffee shop.”

Or, “When I’m an architect, I’m gonna blah blah blah”

“When I’m a fashion designer…”

“When I run my own animal sanctuary…”

“When I’m a chef…”

Insert literally any career, and when I was a kid, I thought of it in terms of when I do that, not if. It wasn’t like I was stupid — I knew grownups only had one or two jobs. It wasn’t that I genuinely thought I was going to do all of those things, as much as I was allowing myself to be fully immersed in the daydream every time I imagined one.

And when I got older, choosing one path felt like taking a ~big fat dump~ on the rest.

Movement toward one career meant grieving the possibility of others.

And I honestly feel like I never fully pushed past that.

That was the appeal of YouTube for me. If I made a career out of filming myself, at least I could film myself doing ANYTHING. But now that it was time to narrow in on my content a little bit, I was back in that room of doors, this time trying to pick one to walk through for the rest of my life.

I tried to really jerry rig my “brand” so that I could maintain as much freedom as possible. For a brief but very concentrated period, I thought of making my channel about me trying a bunch of different things, and calling it Phoebe Dabbles.

It would follow a girl who wanted to spend her life trying everything. An episode would begin with me being a total novice at something, and then I would make getting better at it a full-time job for a month, and see how far I could get by the end.

Think “Try Guys” but without cheating middle-aged men.

I got so excited about the idea. It was all I could think about throughout our entire van-life month traveling up and down the coast. It’s easy to feel inspired when you’re essentially living outside and having brainstorm sessions on various seaside cliffs.

But as quickly and strongly as that idea came, I became burnt out. I burnt out before I’d even begun.

All of the logistics really overwhelmed me. I would need constant hired help and commitment from outside “coaches” in essentially everything I was going to dabble in. I still think it would be such a fun endeavor, but for a girl with no money and very few resources, it seemed like a bit of a stretch.

This led right into the second phase of my burnout period — Idea Burnout.

As I thought of more and more ideas, I became increasingly discouraged by the feeling of excitement consistently followed by the realization of all of the reasons that it probably wouldn’t work. I would get burnt out just by thinking about the idea, and then I became burnt out from thinking of so many ideas.

It was burnout on burnout on burnout.

The conversation with myself shifted from, “None of this will work,” to, “Maybe I’m just lazy, and any of this would’ve worked if I’d actually gotten off my a$$ and tried.”

And thus, I entered the world’s least productive thought loop.

I wanted to quit everything, marry rich, and never have to figure anything out ever again.

I went from hating the idea that I couldn’t do everything to hating the idea of having to do anything.

And then came the involuntary leave of absence. Better known as: ~depression.~

I ceased all creative operations. I went to my day job, went to the beach, hung out with my friends, travelled back to America to see family, and didn’t give a damn about anything else.

Then, and only then, did an idea come to me.

And it wasn’t some big channel or brand overhaul idea. It was just an idea for a video I wanted to make. And it wasn’t even a unique idea. In fact, it was probably one of the most unoriginal ideas ever.

Little spring fashion trend predictions kept popping into my head, and I would write each down in my notes as they came. One day I woke up with the instinct to film a video talking about them.

And I’m not lying when I tell you it was NOT a strategic move. I had filmed and posted one trend forecasting video about 6 months prior, and it had absolutely tanked. I’m talkin’ the worst-performing video on my channel.

But I just wanted to do it again. So I did.

And that video got about 6x more views than the best performing video on my channel at that time. Thus, my fashion niche was born. Not because of the view count, although that certainly helped, but because of the ease and fun that I had while making it.

I was off to the races. And for the first time in a year, creating felt easy again.

Maybe you’ve already gathered the “lesson” in all of this. But it took me a while to understand it, so at the risk of insulting your intelligence, I’ll spell it out anyway.

I’ve always heard that burnout is normal. I’d heard there was a difference between laziness and burnout. But what nobody tells you is that sometimes the way out of burnout is to stop trying.

When you’re exhausted from pouring effort into something, pouring effort into “fixing” that exhaustion can become its own kind of trap.

Sounds obvious, but when you’ve confused burnout for laziness, not trying seems like the last thing you should do. When your brain says “I haven’t created anything in a while, I’m being so lazy,” it’s very hard to tell yourself that the solution is to continue not creating anything, but this time, on purpose.

But there’s a reason giving up is the, dare I say, “key to opening the next door.” And it’s a little hippy-dippy.

Wanting something badly while believing you don’t yet have the tools or direction to get it creates resistance within you. The gap between what you want and what you believe you can actually do is the reason for the pit in your stomach.

So thinking of more ideas from that headspace — no matter how good they are — only widens the gap.

Your ideas become more plentiful, yet your belief in your ability to carry them out remains the same.

And eventually that resistance becomes paralyzing.

When your brain is being mean to you, thinking of more things you don’t believe you can do only makes things worse. And when your confidence isn’t ready to catch up to your ambition yet, the only way to close the gap is to quiet the ambition for a little while. It won’t go far. It will always be there when you’re ready for it. But for now, just give up. And soon you will realize it was the best business decision you’ve ever made.

I learned this lesson because I hit a breaking point. I gave up because my brain went so far that depression took over and didn’t really leave me another option.

But it would probably be wise to give up before the depression hits — a theory that can really test your relationship with the idea of “laziness.”

Don’t wait until something forces you to give up. Just do it the next time you find yourself wanting to ask Mrs. Puff to excuse you for the rest of your life. And before you know it, the burnout won’t feel like something you have to push through anymore.

One day you’ll just notice it’s gone.

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I was lying in bed in a Coolum Beach share-house, alone after another post-panic-attack slumber. At the time, I lived with four boys. They were in a band, and each of them had their own careers outside of it. Me on the other hand — I had just quit my 9-to-5 design job after only three months and started working part-time as a “safety supervisor” at a high ropes course in the Australian rainforest. It was… dare I say… incredible.

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t in my head about what all my housemates were doing — and what I wasn’t.

I was a straight A student (or in Australian university terms, a straight HD student), aced the SATs blind, and graduated both high school and college with a near-perfect GPA. I’d been creative my entire life and received honors and rewards for my art left and right in school, and yet all of my surf-and-sun-obsessed chiller housemates seemed to be miles ahead of me in both the career and creativity department. Measures of success I had gotten used to were, as it turned out, meaningless.

A strange thing happens when you live with roommates for the first time. You suddenly start perceiving yourself — and what you do all day — from the point of view of someone watching. No one warns you how vulnerable it feels to simply ~live~ in front of other people. Maybe my hyper-awareness of the eyes on me is partly due to my OCD, but it really lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways to fill my time.

It wasn’t all negative motivation, though. Hearing my friends jam in the garage every night after a full day’s work was one of the best feelings ever. I adored their friendship and the fact that they still wanted to collaborate on something creative when I’m sure they were exhausted from their manual labor and office jobs. It was clear that, in those moments, it didn’t feel like work to them. Beers and instruments and pedals and amps were their wind-down tools — and they just so happened to be part of their second job.

Apart from how much I genuinely loved their music, I loved watching their dynamic, too.

One night, I got home from the hospital after surgery, and the boys had set up a comfy spot on the couch in the garage for me to lay. They played me a private show while I was drugged up and barely mobile. It was one of the sweetest moments of my life and I will never forget it.

I wanted to close my eyes and enjoy the moment, but my brain went somewhere else. I wondered where my own creativity had gone. Surely it was still in there, but how had it taken me this long to realize I wasn’t doing a blessed thing with it?

I wanted to do what they had done. I wanted to build something tangible with all the creative energy I’d just let aimlessly swirl around for years.

There was only one problem: wtf should I make?

I sucked at singing, I hadn’t touched an instrument since my last piano lesson in fourth grade, I’m not patient enough to paint or draw, and honestly, I was never that good at my graphic design job either. I was a good employee — good at following directions and building efficient sales funnels (riveting) — but a particularly talented graphic designer? No.

You know how they say that if you can’t figure out what you want to do with your life, you should think back to what you loved as a kid?

Well, my sister Maddy and I used to squeeze together into our dad’s office chair, type movie scripts on the desktop computer, film with our home-video camcorder, and edit the footage in iMovie — and later, Final Cut Pro. (Yes, we asked for Final Cut Pro for Christmas at the ages of 7 and 11.)

You might be familiar with some of our work: Corn the Movie, Whipped Cream Madness, and, of course, Shnoogle — a weekly web show that never made it past the pilot.

I loved the spotlight at that age. There’s a video of Maddy interviewing me after a “concert” I put on from the living room stage (the coffee table). She says, “So Phoebe, this is your first time performing without background singers. Why do you like singing alone?”

To which I reply, “Because then the audience is ONLY looking at me.”

Double Leos gonna double Leo.

But somewhere along the way, I learned that being a “center of attention” kind of girl was not cute.

Girls in high school got shat-upon for being loud at parties or “dressing for attention” in class. I, myself, caught wind of some comments about my heavy makeup and less-than-conservative outfits freshman year. And while I am a Leo, I’m the kind that despises attention if it is even 1% negative. So from that day forward, I swore I would change my image.

Pretty dramatic response to one comment, but alas, I could not let it happen again.

I stopped wearing makeup to school, eased up on chasing boys, and became the chill friend who stayed mellow at parties and played pong with the guys while the girls giggled and took pictures. Ah yes — the classic diva-to-pick-me-girl pipeline. Our generation’s most feared overcorrection.

And the crazy thing was, it worked.

I no longer heard my name grouped in with bad high school press. I was soft and well-liked and genuinely thought of myself as an introvert. At the time, I really believed all of that change was just “maturing.”

That is, until the year 2023.

My boyfriend at the time — a member of the aforementioned band — noted that his mates all loved me and thought I was “super chill.” A comment that would have sent me to heaven when I was 16. But this time, it left a funny taste in my mouth.

The connotation of the sentiment was that their girlfriends would get soOoO mad about things that I would just laugh off. But I didn’t feel proud; I felt defensive of all the other girls who are rightfully bothered by things and get eye-rolled for it.

That seemingly insignificant comment led me to recall my image-overhaul. And it kinda terrified me. Had my incessant need to be liked completely overtaken my natural instincts? My personality? My way of being in relationships?

Lord, beer me a backbone.

So, as I lay there on the musty couch, hospital bracelet still on and live music fading into the background, I wondered if I’d be further ahead in my career if I had never stifled my own temperament. If I had let my camera-loving nature remain an innocent idiosyncrasy instead of treating it like a flaw that needed fixing.

Now, even in the moment, I knew not to spiral too far. I’m sure some of my personality changes did come from natural character development. But the day’s pondering made me want to push back against my belief that wanting to be seen is inherently obnoxious.

I never felt that way about anyone else.

I was an avid YouTube watcher and adored following along with my internet friends. In the back of my mind, I was always imagining how I would do it if I had my own channel — what I’d talk about, how I’d want to make people feel, what music I’d use, how I’d want everything to look aesthetically. I thought it would be a ball.

But in my head, it was cool when they did it and narcissistic when I wanted to.

Fast forward to the morning of the 22nd. My boyfriend was out of town, so I woke up alone. I saw my reflection in the giant paneled mirror leaning against the wall opposite my bed. Eyes barely open, I looked at my grown-out pixie cut, my puffy eyes and sunburnt cheeks, and my bunched-up pink Djerf Avenue bedding (pre-toilet scandal).

Then my eyes landed on the camera sitting on my dresser — a pretty nice Sony mirrorless I’d bought a few months prior for yet another failed side hustle.

‘I’m going to vlog today,’ I thought. And I knew I had to act quickly before I changed my mind.

I grabbed the camera, got back into bed, and filmed a clip of myself yawning and stretching. I filmed my windows, my mirror, my T-shirt, my bedhead. I took advantage of the boys being at work and brought my camera into the kitchen. I filmed myself making the smoothie bowl I had eaten every day for six years.

When it came time to talk to the camera, it took me 14 tries.

I wanted to speak, and I didn’t even think I was nervous, but it felt like someone had turned the volume down on my voice. Every take came out quiet and timid. But for some reason, that day, there was no other option. It never crossed my mind to stop filming.

After finally forcing out one complete sentence, I decided it would have to be good enough. I needed to get on with my day and keep filming.

I filmed my beach swim. I filmed myself editing photos for my dancer friends. I filmed my lunch. And by the afternoon, I was telling the camera a ten-minute-long story.

It became my journal.

From that moment forward, it was understood — at least internally — that I would be filming and posting on YouTube every single week. I had no reason to believe this wouldn’t be another short-lived idea. I hadn’t exactly proven my commitment to myself.

But somehow, there was a calm, quiet knowing that it would stick.

And it did.

I lost myself to teenage scrutiny — a sad cliché, really. But on the morning of April 22nd, 2023, I got my voice back.

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Harvested with forceps and a latex hand,
Thrown in a plastic garbage can.
The softest part of a little girl
Now biohazard waste.

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But sometimes I wish
Empathy wasn’t to be admired.
I wish we weren’t applauded for
Seizing feelings that make us tired.

What’s admirable is compassion —
Understanding why others act and feel.
But the notion that empathy serves
Is more assumed than it is real.

You can never get poor enough
to help the poor.
You can never get depressed enough
to help the depressed.
You can never get sick enough
to help the sick.

The only way to help is from a place of plenty —
of having enough to give.

I’m glad they admire compassion,
But I wish the praise would stop there.
To take on the stress and the weight of the world
Is not the only way to care.

If we really want to help,
Joy is the tool to use.
It isn’t selfish to bask in your bliss — sometimes,
It’s the most generous thing to do.

It’s simple enough to hear,
But difficult to remember
When you’re watching a world of people
Walk through treacherous endeavors.

You wind up feeling guilty
That your life is yours to live,
So you shift your mind and share in the worry
Because it feels like all you can “give”.

There you are, lost in stress,
Mistaking it for your own,
Hoping that it is helpful enough
To take it all on alone.

But there is no limit of stress in the world.
It doesn’t get traded or swapped.
You cannot take it from someone else.
You can only make more, or not.

You can compassionately live.
You can passionately fight.
You can bask in all your comfort and joy
While advocating for what is right.

It’s true what they say — that misery loves company,
But we’ve taken it the wrong way.
It’s Misery, himself, that needs more woe
To keep growing day after day.

You cannot do good if you do not feel good —
That’s all that needs to be said.
So next time you find yourself praising empathy,
Encourage compassion instead.

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His always-presence made me confuse him for myself.
His voice was like mine, his tone — like my own.
His made-up ultimatums would circle in my head
And my only choice was to listen.

I counted the letters in my name —
Spell, count, repeat.
I emphasized my consonants
To satisfy my tongue.
I cracked my neck and clicked my jaw
And touched every wall to feed my palms.
And yet, with all my duties done,
His grip only grew stronger.

I grew up a slave to him.
He built his home in my brain
And settled into my name.
My peace of mind
Came from his piece of mine
And if I ever said he hurt me
He’d make me count the ways.

His blaring commands
Became whispers in my ear.
His grip on me weakened
But he still held my hand.
There was no rhyme or reason
To his fleeting demand,
And I think I might not
Ever understand.

He made me feel clever —
My awareness was honed.
Sometimes I’m glad
I didn’t grow up alone.

But if OCD should find me again,
Tie his string around my neck and
Move his hand to make me dance,
I’d gladly stuff his throat with his own sterile rope.

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