“I feel like an imposter every time I wear something different.” Yeah, because embarrassment is improvements greatest enemy.
Your style doesn't have to be brilliant to evolve, it just has to evolve
A series I haven’t thought of a title for where I take your most asked questions and pull em apart.
Effort requires no talent
I get so many comments every day that center around the same idea: How can i begin?
Believe me, I have been where you are. It’s embarrassing and awkward. Sometimes I feel like I’m both the fish in the bowl and the child with her nose pressed against the glass. Does the fish know its in water, or does it think its flying?
To ensure I don’t accidentally write a 10,000 word essay, I’m going to break down how you can get over this feeling in 3 ways. You can do them all at once or one at a time, feel free to self-prescribe as you see fit.
1: The biggest lies we tell ourselves is that we are not confident enough to become what we want to be.
One of the most over-used, bullshit expressions is ‘fake it till ya make it”. It’s always sung out with the same fake sweetness used in cough syrup, by people who look the exact same as everyone else. The over-arching idea, that you should summon your strength and do something even when it freaks you out, is a good one. But im going to request you look at this differently.
The more you tell yourself you’re faking it, the more that feeling of imposter will remain. The biochemistry of pretending proves this method is destined to fail because pretense is not a bridge to confidence; it is a rehearsal of insufficiency.
To put it differently: You already have the confidence to look the way you want to. It’s simply misdirected. How do I know this? Because you’re confident in your incapacity.
You state, I’m not good at this, with absolute authority. You believe your own doubt, unwaveringly. That, my friend, is supreme confidence. You just need to bend it to your will.
Understand: The person who wants to change is not going to look in the mirror and see that person. They’re going to see who they currently are, which is a reflection of who you were. In order to become someone new, you have to be able to look at someone you dont recognize, and resist the urge to go back to who you think you should be. Effort is rewarding, lies are consuming. Bite the hand that oppresses you, especially if its your own.
2: Nothing is embarrassing if you’re not embarrassed.
I moved to New York with no job, no friends, and the disapproval of my parents. I worked 3 jobs to pay rent and when I was finally able to get the love of my life, my pomeranian Draco, into the city, it was glorious but fuck it was hard, everything was difficult and I just thought it would be so much easier. Everything was embarrassing. Literally everything. I had all these ideas of who I thought I should be, Sex and the City reruns playing in my mind telling me “a real New Yorker wears this, a true New Yorker wears that!” At some point I just had to say fuck it. Who cares? The more embarrassing I was the more I numbed myself to it.
The exposure effect has two purposes:
The first is to get everyone used to watching you look like an ugly fool (iykyk that in my eyes, ugliness is next to holiness. If your greatest goal is to look pretty than I’m afraid we don’t have much in common).
The second is to shock your brain into looking at different versions of you so many times that after awhile, theres no ‘normal’ and ‘regular’. Your thoughts detatch, “I look like this today and I might look like that tomorrow”. It’s fluid, it flows. Like water.
3: Who you think you are is what other people believe.
This very idea pushed me off the high-dive and into the subconscious waters below:
If what you believe about yourself is what others experience as real, then you create who they think you are. What we wear and how we wear it creates the conditions for who we believe ourselves to be.
The feedback loop of identity (discussed at greater lengths here) is how our self-image is formed.
We dress based on who we think we are and what we believe about ourselves. This gets a social response, positive, negative or neutral, and our brain uses this reaction as proof of who we think we are. This proof confirms who we already believe ourselves to be, and tomorrow, we are likely to dress the same way because of it.
Your style is not metaphorical. It is behavioral.
4: Invite judgement or remain invisible.
Consider this my argument against ever building a capsule wardrobe.
The shadow of looking appropriate, polished, corporate, is that inevitably, when someone takes a look around the room, theyre not going to see you. They’re going to see a cluster of people all wearing roughly the same thing, from roughly the same season, in roughly the same palette. They’re going to group you in with the herd, and their brain is going to spend energy remembering the person that actually stood out.
No matter what we’d like to believe, our brain doesn’t remember what we want it to. It rememebers the uncommon denominator, the black sheep, the outlier. Willingly or unwillingly, when you dress like everyone else, the brain will assume you’re a follower. It will see your very presentable, very well-dressed look, and come to this assumption because you look like youre very good at following directions. You’re good at doing what youre told, what you should. If you always look the way you’re supposed to, everyone will think you work for someone else. You need to start doing things, even very small things, to pull yourself away from this.
You must invite judgement on your terms, or else they will think you’re the exact same as everyone else.
With great personal aesthetic,
Alexandra Diana, The A List