Because I know what I like

It’s taken me 16 years of sharing my style online to realize that maybe personal style is just repetition with conviction.

I love listening to women just a few years older than I am talk about this magical change that seems to happen in their 40s, where they start caring less about what other people think and start trusting their own inner knowing that’s probably been there all along.

As someone who spent much of my twenties and thirties people-pleasing, shape-shifting, and fielding comments online about being boring or predictable or simply “yawn”… I’ve long yearned for my own transformative moment of feeling like I’m allowed to like what I like without apologizing or conforming to anyone suggesting otherwise.

I posted something to that effect in a video last week and was surprised by the positive response. “Why do you always wear blue and white?” asked the text on-screen. “Because I know what I like,” answered the caption. I don’t think it was a particularly exciting outfit in the video that resonated — I think it was the confidence, the decisiveness, the lack of apology about showing up in exactly what makes me feel like me.

And I really do know what I like. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve liked a lot of the same things — not all, but a lot — for a long time. I just haven’t always trusted my own taste to be enough.