Finding my Aesthetic
October 2020
We can find peace in everything that surrounds us. We just have to truly listen to our ourselves.
Alright, I’m going to keep it real with y’all. Back in high school (yes - a LONG time ago lol I’m digging deep here), I had a pretty nice sense of fashion. My school had a “business casual” dress code, and I dressed up every day: heels, blouse, slacks/skirts, different hairstyle every day.
EVERY. DAY. FOR. FOUR. YEARS.
I don’t know what happened once I graduated because that all changed in college. I was tired – no, I was exhausted. I only had the energy to wear sweats and baggy shirts/hoodies; I got lazy and it felt too good to stop going the extra mile.
When I got a job after college, I hated dressing up.
I never knew what to wear. I had outgrown my high school style, but I also didn’t know what I liked aside from being comfortable. The different things I liked often clashed, and I could never make up my mind on what I wanted to wear.
It felt like I had to compromise comfort for fashion, and I wasn’t quite willing to do that.
When it came to decorating my apartment? Ugh - I was miserable. I wanted to have a nice-looking place, but I knew nothing about home decor. Worse than that, I found it boring, and I had no interest in learning because the options felt endless. On top of that, my mom had never been into home decor either, so I didn’t have a natural reference point.
Therefore, I paid no mind to “aesthetics” of any kind for years, all the way through about halfway of last year (2022).
Because I was so stressed out from building my startup and trying to do a million things at once, I felt compelled to make my own life easier (while adding another thing to my to-do list, yes, glad you caught on to that :):
I wanted everything from my makeup to my clothes to the things surrounding me in my home to make me a better person somehow.
So, I began, slowly but surely, to spend time looking online and on social media for clues about how to get started. Soon after I began, my sister, who has much better taste in home decor than I do, helped me to identify what I truly liked. That aesthetic turned out to be “airy,” “natural,” and “organic” with a few black statement pieces.
Those words translate into a lot of neutral colors, which I never knew could bring me so much peace. “Neutral colors” are mostly beiges, creams, whites, sandy colors, browns, tan, and some bold, black pieces (both in my wardrobe and home).
Through this process of really focusing on identifying what I liked about the home decor posts I saved, I began to understand why I liked those details. The sandy/wooden colors reminded me of nature, which I grew up around back in Peru. For example, wicker baskets gave me those “warm,” “organic” vibes that I’d grown up seeing in the Andes mountain range of Cusco (Peru), specifically.
I realized that even though I also love other colors (red, blue, grey, and pink), those were colors I loved as a child (who grew up in NYC, which is FULL of color) more so than who I want to be as an adult: relaxed, laid back, cozy, calm, and content.
Neutral colors make me smile because they give me a sense of stability instead of the chaos I lived in for so many years (more on that another time).
So, toward the end of 2022, I began to buy things slowly…because there were still a lot of decisions I had to make to fit into my space and budget (having 3 dogs ain’t cheap, and they’re always a priority).
Coming into 2023, I feel more in tune with my wants and needs than ever before. I feel capable of building what I want for myself, even in an area that has felt out of grasp for so long.
This is why I want to share my journey with “finding my aesthetic” – because to me it means identifying a side of myself I never knew about. And, understanding ourselves fully is an integral part of becoming the elite versions of ourselves that we all so desperately seek.