Seasons are declared not just by the change in weather, but by the new trends that worm its way out of the TikTok ether. I have never had a hot girl summer or a brat girl summer, or one that embodied the vibes of a coastal grandmother. At one point, Sad Girl Autumn made an appearance, which just meant listening to Harry Styles on your bedroom floor and binging Fleabag in bed.
My Pinterest explore pages suggest fall ideas that mimic ‘must-haves in your bag’ — battered copies of Wuthering Heights and Lolita, and five-minute gratitude journals are among some of the items. I flip to Instagram and am targeted with a video on the five things to nail the clean girl aesthetic. And since I’ve watched that video, I’ve been steadily chased around the internet on how to be someone.
On the surface, it looks cool. Trendy, hip, and all the other buzzwords that people are obsessed with attaching identity to. And for a while, I wanted to be like that. I still sometimes do. The visuals, the clean aesthetic and the moodiness are appealing. There’s a comfort to being put into a box, to being defined, tell me who I am and what I look like.
Then I looked into what that meant, what I’m supposed to know and read and watch. And I realise that not only am I so far from embodying the latest cool girl, but I have the patience of an over-caffeinated squirrel. I don’t have time to read 800 pages of Anna Karenina or The Secret History or watch the latest TV show. Do you know how many different show-hosted platforms there are? Too many. If I subscribed to them all, I’d have to transition to a diet of bread and water. Adopting a new identity to please other people who don’t matter is an expensive affair.
While it initially feels like some sort of pivotal identity change, doing these things doesn’t last. It’s a job to try to be someone else, to listen to music that you don’t like, to read books that are long and dry and offer nothing but crappy commentary on our society. I get it. I do. Having a thick book with sticky tabs and highlighted paragraphs in the Bookstagram / Booktok space is popular right now. You want to fit in.
But here’s what I’ve found.
I got bored very quickly. Like the following-week-type of quickly. Pushing myself to adopt the skin of somebody so different, so out of my comfort zone, made me miserable. I once had a giant Tolstoy book with me that I flipped through and nearly fell asleep reading; I’ve skipped through albums on niche artists to try and find something to hook onto. If I couldn’t be the fashion girlie with the perfect outfit and I couldn’t be the slim yoga girlie or corporate gal, then surely I could find myself as a book girlie — but even then there were barriers. You had to read certain books by certain authors, and there had to be some deep pivotal message in it that touched on something in our society.
I’m not a cool girl and I probably won’t ever be one.
And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. I probably won’t ever understand the obsession with Rupi Kaur’s poems, the appeal of Emma Chamberlain’s YouTube diaries, or the nuance that was Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People.
And perhaps this is a rant from someone who has always sat on the outside of the circle, but as nice as it is to try and define who we are, to find our group of people, the cold dose of reality is that we’re not one-dimensional, we can like and be a whole host of things. I can be a cultural girlie and still read my shitty romance novels with predictable endings. I can still have the so-called clean health aesthetic and have my weekends pastry-filled. And I can like five songs from an artist without knowing their entire catalogue of music.
I’m going to consume media without it being an aesthetic, without it being a part of my brand. I’m probably going to arrive at the cultural party way too late simply because I don’t care to keep up with what’s happening. I’ll like what I like. In a world where we’re told everything on social media is curated and all for show, the last thing we should be doing is defining our personal brands, and our own identities to be something we’re not.
So here’s the thing. If you enjoy reading Sylvia Plath, drinking red wine or five a.m. wake times to fill your gratitude journal, that’s great; you do that. So long as you remember that this has to be for you and not to look cool. And if you want to read exclusively HEA romance or fantasy novels and binge cringe-worthy episodes of Seinfeld while in the bath, that is cool too and I am probably doing the same thing.
In fact, this is the soul of wisdom. Much of the cool girl thing is targeted marketing. It is a story in search of clicks, part of the monetized attention economy the Internet has inflicted upon us in new and ever-evolving ways. Just knowing yourself and being comfortable in your own skin puts you way, way ahead of 90 percent of the population. For example, I've rarely worn make up. Even my daughter, when she was 3 (!) told me, "Mom, you could use a little lipstick sometimes." I laughed, and said, "Yeah, I know. Not gonna happen." All blessings to women with $1,000 worth of cosmetics, but that's just not me. Very uncool! But you know what? I'm happy. And, I bet, so are you.
The 'coolest' thing you can be is original. The pressure to fit into these carefully curated aesthetics circles back on itself and becomes the cliche. Someone who was once 'cool' or 'unique' for reading Tolstoy while having a glass of wine by candlelight, becomes the new basic...not that there's anything wrong with basic, but that's a topic for another day.
As soon as something becomes commercialized, the essence of its oomph disappears. SO just because your love for HEA romance and Seinfeld hasn't been aestheticized (yet) does not mean it isn't cool, it just means people aren't aware of how cool it is.