I remember feeling so lost and isolated throughout my high school experience, not understanding who I was, or what I wanted. I thought that once I got to college and restarted with a fresh slate that the answer to these questions would come to me naturally. Unfortunately that was anything but the case for me, which I almost feel is part of the point: answering these questions isn’t supposed to be easy. In an effort to figure this out I went through so many personal rebrands, wardrobe changes, new hobbies and interests. I have found that, for me, finding bits and pieces of myself has come from personalization, and doing it carelessly.
When I say personalization I don’t just mean putting stickers on your laptop: by personalization I mean the act of tailoring activities, aesthetics, and routines to fulfill you. Think of yourself as your own personal curator of things that bring you joy and calm. For me, this looked like allowing myself to wander, feel gravitated by things, and ignore the urges to quiet or quicken myself. When I first started to lead my life in this way, it looked like simply following these feelings of joy instead of suppressing them in order to fit into the norm.
As I allowed this feeling to guide me, I found myself in more and more spaces that fulfilled me, and I began to associate myself with the things that I found in these spaces. Take Hooked for example: a coffee shop, book shop, and wine bar all wrapped into one homey space in East Lansing. It’s busy, it’s filled with community, and jammed full of things that I already partake in: crafts, books, and writing groups. I started folding writing at Hooked into my schedule — inviting friends to get homework done or write articles together in this space, and since then I have started to see reflections of the values that I hold all around me. Spending time in this space taught me that I value art, meaningful conversation, and interwoven, complex spaces. Everything has begun to feel sturdy and connected in relation to this one hub.
Starting with finding these spaces gave me the foundation I needed to build the rest of myself. In these spaces I found books that I have come to fall in love with, people that I care about, stickers that are now on my laptop, and vibes forever.
Accumulating a collection of these spaces has given me a foundation on which to base my more material personalizations: the things we might automatically think of like stickers, outfits, tattoos, or decor. Rather than following a Pinterest board collection of someone else’s vibe in order to attempt to find my own, I started to find aesthetics that I thought mirrored the things that I would see in the spaces that I love.
I wanted to curate my own spaces around these vibes I was feeling connected to. I began to collage on Canva to create my own desktop backgrounds, color code my Google Calendar and embed photos within it, sticker my laptop, and even get tattoos that communicated the aspects of my identity that I had been finding in these spaces.
The material side of personalization is not everything, and is not the sole answer to your questions of identity — or at least it wasn’t for me. Following your interests, and not just the ones that you deem presentable to the masses, is what can help build the foundation of figuring out who you really are.