Not to *gasp* deviate too much from beauty, but my new favorite blogger, The Sartorialist, wrote something incredibly insightful in his post on Tuesday, that I’ve been chewing over in my head. He was writing in regards to a chance meeting with a girl, Kara, who he’d encountered on the streets of NYC a year ago, and how her style had evolved so dramatically (for the better). He wrote:

Actually the line that I think was the most telling but that she said like a throw-away qualifier was “I didn’t know anyone in New York when I moved here….”

I think that is such a huge factor. To move to a city where you are not afraid to try something new because all the people that labeled who THEY think you are (parents, childhood friends) are not their to say ” that’s not you” or “you’ve changed”. Well, maybe that person didn’t change but finally became who they really are. I totally relate to this as a fellow Midwesterner even though my changes were not as quick or as dramatic.

I bet if you ask most people what keeps them from being who they really want to be (at least stylistically or maybe even more), the answer would not be money but the fear of peer pressure - fear of embarrassing themselves in front of a group of people that they might not actually even like anyway.

If you were really honest with yourself and really wanted to change your style what is keeping you from doing that? Is it really the cost? Is it really your psychical shape? availability of goods? Or is it not fitting in at your office, or PTA, or skateboard park?

We can apply this same concept to beauty, yes. (What exactly is keeping you from being the rosy-eyelidded girl that you were destined to be?) But we can apply it also, as he said, to life in general.

There was this poem that my college writing teacher pulled out for us the first day of class that has always stuck with me, and become my unofficial mantra. By my prof’s own admission, it’s not a great poem except for the redeeming last few lines:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

Life is too short for regrets. It’s too short to not be doing what you want to be doing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 10:47 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.