NOTES ON SELF-WORTH

It’s knowing when you deserve an apology and knowing when you owe one. It’s being forgiving and opening your heart up to second chances but not peeling your skin back to hand your heart to someone who doesn’t know how to handle it. It’s giving yourself the space to grow, learn, and make mistakes. It’s walking away from a situation that no longer serves you and understanding it’s not personal if someone does the same. It’s knowing when something is right or wrong for you and having the strength to act accordingly. It’s appreciating the opinions of others but not scratching them into the soles of your feet as though they are the foundation on which you are built. It’s knowing boundaries and respecting them. It’s being soft and open and loving but knowing when those things are going to hurt you. It is not confidence or arrogance or believing yourself to be someone you’re not, it is simply understanding that the things your hands hold are worthy of your touch, and the words you speak are worthy of being heard.

We tend to attach the idea of self-worth to an abundance of things it’s not. We often belittle ourselves into the ground to avoid anyone mistaking it for vanity, believing that to know what we deserve paints confidence in ugly colours. Too often, we take our worth and place it in the palms of others and sit it on the tips of their tongues; the way we are treated becomes the benchmark we pin ourselves to, lowering and raising ourselves respectively. We settle ourselves into situations that we don’t belong in, shrinking our limbs into spaces we’ve outgrown because we don’t trust our throats enough to speak our truths. We fumble for external validation, grasping for reassurance in the dark and clinging onto it in an attempt to replicate ourselves into what receives the most praise. I have, time and time again, found myself bereft of confidence and sought to seek it from others as if it is something I can borrow and return when I figure out how to create it for myself. I have torn myself apart and attempted to stick the pieces back together, a patchwork stitched and unstitched until I found a version that other people liked.

Over the years, my self-worth has been something I’ve had to establish and take responsibility for. I spent so long living by the notion that approval made me valuable. I never thought self-worth was something I got to decide, instead, I handed it over to other people and let them think that how I should be treated was their choice to make. I placed my self-worth on the shoulders of social media, on how I was perceived by other people, on whether I was wanted, on my achievements, on how successful I believed I was or wasn’t. I emptied myself of everything I thought I didn’t deserve and decided I needed to earn it. I only felt worthy of something if I had something to show for it, reasons stacking up on piles of torn paper in a fragile attempt to convince myself I was good enough. Placing my self-worth on such delicate means taught me how easily it could collapse.

Confidence and self-worth are not the same thing. Over the last few months, I’ve realised that my self-worth is something that has kept me afloat in situations that I struggled to swim in. I used to believe that self-worth meant you thought you were above things, a preempted idea that anything that presented itself to you wasn’t good enough. We live in a society that turns anything we do for ourselves sour, and in turn, we swallow our words and avoid standing up for ourselves in favour of saving face. Brick by brick, I am trying to tear down the wall I have built between myself and the things I know to be true about myself.

I listened to a podcast recently by Kalyn Nicholson and she was speaking about self-worth and how it’s all you need to overcome any kind of heartbreak. One thing she said that stuck with me in particular was that our self-worth is comprised of our standards and our values; our standards being what we accept from the outside in and our values being what we accept from the inside going out. This brought simplicity to self-worth that I had missed all this time. My self-worth is not what I think about myself or my abilities, it is instead that I know how I deserve to be treated, and I know how other people deserve to be treated by me. I have been through various situations recently in which my self-worth has enabled me to trust myself enough to do what’s right for me. Self-worth is not stitched into our abilities to make people like us and approve of us or in what we can and can’t do, it is instead our ability to be true to ourselves and trust ourselves in knowing what’s best for us.

People will come and go from our lives, and we will love and lose over and over again without always knowing why. We will get things wrong and take the falls as the collateral damage of other people getting things wrong, but as phases of life turn to dust and settle in the cracks of our floorboards, it is our self-worth that will hold the walls up around us. As we walk away from people and people walk away from us, our souls are rooted in our beings, our self-worth holding us together at the seams and stopping us from falling apart. 

THE LOVE LANGUAGE OF FRIENDSHIPS

It is its own kind of love. The kind of love that is ever-changing in its shape, shifting and moulding itself to life’s ebbs and flows but never breaking apart. The kind of love that is messy in its honesty, a vulnerability that crawls out of corners of ourselves we let each other into. The kind of love that doesn’t demand anything but knows its boundaries and respects them without fear of losing one another. Our friendships speak their own love language that keeps us afloat and bound to each other, a language that communicates the kind of love that cannot be explained through the simplicity of words. 

In my twenties, friendship has taken on a different meaning. We’ve all had our fair share of friendships; the fleeting, non-committal friendships that made up the fabrics of our teenage years, the friendships that we never thought we’d lose, the kind that we once believed to be lifelong and broke our hearts in a way we didn’t think they could break, the ones that faded as lives expanded beyond the four walls of where we grew up, spreading across varying miles they couldn’t endure. Growing up, friendships come and go like phases and losing and learning from them is our first real experience of heartbreak. Coming out on the other side of the chaos of our teenage years, life starts to settle in new ways and the friendships that lasted through all of it and newer ones that feel as though they were around for that long are the ones that gain our unwavering admiration.

The love language of our friendships is multifaceted, manifesting itself in subtleties and vibrancies that punctuate our lives with details of each other. Each friendship is different but each one expresses its loyalty in its own way, without expectations and with an understanding that life sometimes gets in the way. It’s a text checking in that everything’s ok and if not, we’ll do whatever is needed. It’s a Facetime call to ask a question we can’t be bothered to type. It’s a ‘yes, of course, we can rearrange babe. No stress at all, get a good night’s sleep ok?’ text because we all know the feeling of getting home and realizing you don’t have the energy to go back out again. It’s texting the most irrelevant pieces of information but knowing they’ll still care. It’s having two families because theirs feels like yours too. It’s updating each other on our most recent bowel movements and period disasters, completely unfiltered. It’s having that ~one bitch~ you dislike on behalf of the other person. It’s messaging each other with more affection than we ever show in relationships. It’s a daily good morning text, followed by an outline of the day’s plans. It’s being miles apart and sending old videos to reinforce just how much we miss each other. The threads of our friendships are woven with expressions of love that are not always declarative. They are the small acts of love that symbolize our loyalty, our patience and our enduring gratitude for each other’s presence in our lives.

As our lives evolve and get more complicated and busy, our friendships mature with them. No longer reliant on seeing each other every single day without fail, we find comfort in each other in new ways with a new appreciation for the stability they offer that other areas of our lives can’t. We’re navigating our lives at different paces, exploring avenues of the world and of ourselves that no longer entwine with each other in the ways they used to. We all have our own lives that can take us away from each other for months at a time, but we never leave each other behind. As we get older, we commit to our friendships unequivocally. When it comes down to it, our friends are the ones that are always there. Through all the questionable boyfriends and heartbreaks, and all the shit our families put us through, and all the crises of confidence and insecurities and uncertainty, it is our friends that are there. They see us through everything life throws at us and they still love us afterward. We commit to each other and carry with us the patience and understanding that friendships are different now than how they used to be but they are the same in their faithfulness. We go through and feel each other’s pain as if it is our own while understanding that we often need our own space to heal and sending texts to check in is enough. We are patient with each other and the lives that no longer leave room to be available 24/7, understanding that when we sometimes have to prioritise responsibilities, it is never personal. We are gentle and forgiving with each other but we’ll still kick each other’s arses into gear when one of us talks ourselves down. We are the quiet constant in each other’s lives that ages but does not tarnish. Instead, it is an ongoing reminder that we love and are loved back every second of every day.

My friends are the foundation of the years ahead of me. In my twenties, they are the constant in my life that I can rely on. The love language of my friendships is the concrete of who I am and what I am grateful for, the gestures that show me I am never alone. Though our lives are only getting busier and the distance between us is indefinitely getting bigger, our friendships are the quiet hum of our lives, the soundtrack of the years and the way we will remember them. As we get older and our lives bend and break and fix themselves into what they will eventually become, our friendships will be the sliver of moon above our heads guiding us back home, to ourselves and each other.

COVID-19’S CALL TO ACCOUNTABILITY

Piece written for London Fashion Week 2021

With the fashion industry being undeniably shaken by the pandemic, we are being forced to consider the longevity of fast fashion and how sustainability is at the forefront of our post-pandemic world.

The year is 2016. The weekend has risen through the fog and my friends and I are once again faced with our weekly, ego-crushing dilemma: I have NOTHING to wear. House parties, gatherings and end-of-year balls alike, public appearances were punctuated by the single-digit clicks it took to purchase brand-new, dirt-cheap, wear-once-and-never-again pieces from the likes of Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing and Missguided.

Come 2021, and the notion of I can’t wear that, it’s already in two of my Instagram pictures feels somewhat stale and futile. The ignorance that rendered £6 dresses as a steal and not an environmental and human-rights breach has dissipated into the background, with sustainability and conscious consumerism emerging in its place.

Prior to the pandemic, trends changed faster than our minds and sustainability felt like something we’d think about when we had more time, more money and more reason. Many of our wardrobes were packed full of pieces that had a use-by date and we were the shoppers that took their lifespans at face value and turned them to the grave once they had been surpassed.

I’ll be the first to hold my hand up and admit that the cult-like spread of trends, spearheaded by social media, has had me wrapped around its little finger since I received my first paycheck: whether it be the y2k flared jeans and graphic tank tops of the past year or two (which begs yet another cultural conversation of body exclusivity in fashion that proves we’ve learnt nothing but to swap Lindsay Lohan out for Bella Hadid), or the vibrant colours, patterns and textures reminiscent of the 70s that are rippling their way through this year’s waters, I am yet to fully release myself from its influence.

But when the curtains closed and the stalls were empty, we gave up on asking how long it might be until the crowds reconvened and found ourselves in a position we never had been in before. Who, why and what is it that we buy into capitalism for?

LOCKDOWN: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

From the spread of coronavirus through Italy at the height of Milan Fashion Week in February 2020, to the resale of secondhand items expected to surpass the broader retail sector 11% by 2025, it’s no surprise that the fashion industry has suffered at the hands of the pandemic. The beginning of this year saw Topshop shut its doors, while the British Fashion Council and the Council of Fashion Designers of America released a joint statement asking for ‘fashion’s fast, unforgiving pace, to slow down’ and strongly recommending ‘designers focus on no more than two main collections a year’ instead of the usual four.

But when we strip the last sixteen months back down to their basics, we have witnessed the sheer devastation of our culture, resources and livelihoods. With that, a sweeping sense of morality began to tinge the materialistic habits of a society that has bred and nurtured the more is always more mindset. Furthermore, when dressing up to walk past our neighbour’s windows no longer held an ounce of mystery or intrigue, we succumbed to the comfort of loungewear and suitable top halves to accommodate the plethora of zoom-calls we had no excuse but to show up for.

With nowhere to go and no one to see, many of us made a hobby of decluttering our spaces and with it, our fast fashion habits reared their ugly heads. The devil on my shoulder actualised itself in a variety of forms: a cropped black jumper I ordered from ASOS in a flustered panic the day before a first date and never wore again, two Urban Outfitters graphic tees I had believed at the time to be the absolute best things in the world but had subsequently worn a handful of times before realising they weren’t so ‘in’ any more, and a NA-KD tie front long sleeve blouse which I ordered for one particular New Years Eve where I, ironically, stayed in all night with my Mum (wearing said top for the first and last time, might I add).

Our sense of patience, value and appreciation has become smothered under the guise of‘See-Now-Buy-Now’. Have nothing to wear for the weekend? Order before 11pm and it’ll be yours by the morning. Can’t quite afford it? Buy it now with Klarna and pay later. Want to buy the latest trends but on a budget? Restock your wardrobe for half the price of a weekly food shop at Shein. The list goes on.

While wanting these things doesn’t make you a bad person, they do perpetuate the notion that fast fashion is about convenience and accessibility, while cleverly masking the fact that, as a result, we are producing more greenhouse gas emissions than international aviation and shipping combined.

SUSTAINABILITY: WHERE ARE WE?

With the likes of Depop, Vinted and thredUP making it just as easy to shop relevant trends as it would be to pop onto the ‘Newest’ section of any fast fashion website, the pandemic has ushered a rise in consumers considering sustainability when they shop. Why is this?

Well, aside from the shift in perspective brought about by the world grinding to an unprecedented halt, it arguably has a lot to do with Gen Z who are predicted to be the most well-educated generation that any that have come before it. Eliza Huber, Fashion Market Writer for Refinery29, believes that for Gen Z, the habit of thrifting is less so a way to shop, and more so a lifestyle: ‘Thrifting feels emblematic of the way Gen Z strays from the beaten path. They want to be independent. They want to save the planet. They want to save money — and make money.’

thredUP, an online consignment and thrift store, released their post-Covid 2021 Resale Report which found sustainability as the front-running motivation of the Post-Pandemic Consumer. While the secondhand market is predicted to double in the next five years, there is a significant change in individual mindsets and attitudes: one in three consumers cares more about wearing sustainable clothing than before the pandemic, one in two consumers cares more about saving money on clothes than before the pandemic and 51% of consumers are now more opposed to eco waste. And while Gen Z’s collective attitudes are an incredible vehicle for change, it is also important to note that retailers’ contribution to the progression of sustainability is paramount to a more widespread shift. With this in mind, it’s promising to see that the pandemic has prompted 60% of retailers to report they are open to offering secondhand items to their customers.

INFLUENCERS: WHERE DO THEY STAND?

Well, Gen Z, while being the radical contingent of society they are, are also the first of our kind to be raised on a playground of technology. The snakes and ladders of follower count and launching themselves onto the zip wire of popularity have meant that influencers and content creators hold more weight in their movements and words than ever before. Amidst brand deals and discount codes, there is also a subtle but significant change happening in who and where names are choosing to direct their audiences.

Despite being partnered with the likes of Louis Vuitton, Levis, and Calvin Klein, a quick ‘Emma Chamberlain Thrift’ search on YouTube finds a multitude of thrift hauls and sponsorships, while a quick flick through Depop’s Instagram page finds the likes of Kim Kardashian, Bella Hadid, and Olivia Rodrigo sporting sustainably sourced clothing. And although this feels incredibly cis and white-centric, Depop’s Instagram signposts a plethora of initiatives including API+ Heritage Month, LGBTQIA+ Heritage Month and #BlackOnDepop. Meanwhile over on TikTok, the sustainability hashtag has 338.8M views, while the sustainable fashion hashtag has accumulated an incredible 1.2B views.

Whether it be consciously or subconsciously, it is undeniable that what we consume on social media proliferates our views, attitudes and habits. Subsequently, there is still room to open up a conversation surrounding where influencers could be doing more. A recent Instagram post by Molly-Mae Hague wearing La robe Gardian by Jacquemus, a brilliantly layered jacket dress in black was paired with the caption: ‘PSA: It’s ok to wear the same dress twice.’

Although my initial thoughts were that of gratitude that someone with a platform was attempting to normalise such a thing, I also felt it was reticent to acknowledge some of the more pressing issues at hand. For one, most of us don’t have £520 spare to purchase an item of clothing and only wear it once. In fact, I would go as far as to say that spending a month’s rent on a dress and deciding to wear it on multiple occasions for others to see is not actually a choice at all, but a privilege very few of us can afford. On top of that, Hague has recently released her fifth edit with Pretty Little Thing since leaving the Love Island villa in 2019. Encouraging followers to re-wear clothing feels slightly redundant when the consistent relaunch of brand-new edits automatically deems previous collections as items of the past.

Image: @mollymae via Instagram

It is not progressive to criticise or pile on people in higher positions for making misjudgements we all would make if we were twenty-two and in her situation. However, we have a duty to hold ourselves accountable and see where and how we can do and be better. As much as I don’t want to dismiss Hague’s Instagram PSA that undoubtedly inspired a cohort of teens to re-wear old clothes, there is a fine line on social media between performative action and behind-the-scenes activism that has the potential to propel sustainability forwards or even further backwards.

BRANDS: WHAT NEXT?

With the 2021 fashion weeks in Paris, Milan, and New York set to remain largely digital with the exception of limited invite-only live events, it seems the post-pandemic world of fashion is set to change for the foreseeable future. While the togetherness of live shows calls on fashion’s ability to unite people over a collective passion, the digitalisation of runways appears to have inspired a coalesced space where art and fashion know no bounds. Brands are taking this expansive dimension and creating masterpieces that bring each look to life; where collections were once shown in a particular room on a particular day to a particular audience, they are now being placed in unexplored territories for anyone and everyone to escape into no matter where they may be in the world.

This feels most notable in Balenciaga’s Spring/Summer 2021 collection for Paris Fashion Week, Burberry’s Spring/Summer 2021 collection for London Fashion Week and Dior’s Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2021 collection. The presentations of these collections, whether they be in dystopian settings or ethereal forestry dreamscapes, have taken what we know of fashion and transformed it into its own outlet of creativity; an individualised concept that allows designers, creative directors and models alike to shine lights in places we’ve never thought to look before.

Sustainability is, of course, another huge factor to consider when buying into brands, however many have already paved the way with collections and pledges looking forwards to a brighter, more ethical future. Gucci’s Off The Grid collection uses recycled, organic, bio-based and sustainably sourced materials, with the security of a collective future at the heart of their mission, while Gabriela Hearst, the designer for Chloé’s Fall 2021 Ready-to-Wear collection, spoke with Good Morning Vogue on where her collection sits in response to sustainability. Hearst stated ‘if I don’t put myself to good use on this, I feel I fail. The trying out period is over. It’s now or never.’

So where does that leave us?

The trajectory is not as dismal as it has been. The post-pandemic fashion industry looks a lot different than we ever anticipated it would, but for once, it feels a little more promising for us and the Earth alike.

And while we still have a long way to go, it seems as though we finally have one foot in the door and the powers above us are, at last, considering turning the handle

MUSINGS ON THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE

I can’t see into my kitchen window from where I’m sitting. Flecks of sun bounce from the glass and hold trees in their reflection like a small canvas mounted on the wall. Shadows of leaves rustling in the breeze shimmer on the ground like drops of light glistening on surfaces of oceans and there’s a calm in the stillness that makes me feel like I’m in the middle of one. I can’t remember the last time the sky looked so clear, baby blue silk stretched seamlessly from one corner of my vision to the other without so much as a crease in the middle. The sound of cars pulling off driveways has been replaced by songs sung to each other by birds that have waited all this time to be heard; they talk so loudly that I wonder whether they were there this whole time or whether we just never listened. I have nowhere to be. My legs itch as I tell them to stay put, fighting to swim back to the shore instead of bobbing amid nothing and everything all at once. Time doesn’t seem to exist here; for the first time, I see the fragility in everything. We are suspended between being here and there, never in one place for fear of needing to be in the other and I think of all the times my garden has looked like this with no one around to see it.

We have built our lives from the ground up, each brick cryptically carrying the notion that we need to be more, do more, and want more. We have built empires out of belief systems that told us we need to be bigger and do better. We have belittled time into something that can be made to feel wasted, forgetting that to even have it at all is a blessing in itself. There is a tenderness to time as it is teased out, a gentleness to the way it carries us with it as it ebbs and flows. I am trying to train my mind and my body to not resist stillness and instead to search for its beauty, to not entitle myself to the idea that this moment is not my last. I am trying to teach my mind and my body to be; to not reduce these moments into something brushed under the carpet in the hope for something better. 

I’ve spent years looking at life through a telescope that illuded me to its future; a promise that there is always more ahead to make up for rushing headfirst through it now. I tucked time I’ll never get back into my back pocket and looked instead towards the time I still had to come, heavy-handedly tearing at the seams of all the things that exist in each moment and never will again. I forgot somewhere along the way that it’s fleeting. Like water slipping through the gaps between our fingertips, we don’t realise how much we’re holding until it’s gone. At some point, we lost what it means to be present. We carry our pasts on our backs like coat hangers hung up from each vertebra and we reach towards the future with our arms stretched out for something to hold onto. We turn our backs on the sun as it descends over cities and places pockets of light in corners of rooms and tell ourselves we’ll watch it tomorrow. We hand a limb to every area of our lives and let them pull us in different directions, telling ourselves we’ll slow down tomorrow. We hurry out of doors and watch missed calls pile up like shoes at the back door and tell ourselves we’ll make time for them tomorrow. We are paper in the wind, never settling for too long for fear we’ll turn to dust. We are rush hour traffic, with places and people we never quite seem to get to. We are children going to sleep with tomorrow tucked into our pillowcases like promises, forgetting that the world doesn’t owe us a thing. 

This morning, with myself and these words and my coffee and the sun pouring liquid gold onto every surface within its reach, I am here. I am slowly cutting holes in the fabrics of my mind that made me believe that simply being is not enough. There is no tomorrow morning that I know of. Life is fragile, each moment a fragment of glass that is ours to look through or ours to shatter. We hold pieces of it in the palms of our hands, and for the first time, I am handling it with care.