Quick! Figure Out Who You Are!

Against Rigidity and Categorization

I remember a time in my early teenage years when my conception of the world outside of myself was as deep as a puddle. I was scrolling on Twitter on my phone beside my friend while she scrolled on hers. There were many moments of co-phone time in my teenagehood - early in the morning at a sleepover, returning home from a day at the mall - in which my friends and I would scroll through our personal devices right beside one another, a form of parallel play. We could go at this for hours - mouths slack, thumbs wiggling up and down - until one person inevitably broke the trance, asking the other if she wanted to get something to eat or go on a walk. Co-phone time was only ever broken up by the occasional laugh and showing of a meme. “That’s funny,” the other would say. And then the silence would re-fill the air like smoke and co-phone time would resume.

During this particular Twitter scrolling session, I came across a paparazzi photo of a celebrity couple. I can’t remember exactly who it was now, but given the time period and my interests, I’d have to guess Evan Peters and Emma Roberts, or something in that vein. I remember it was a rather casual photo of the couple, grabbing coffee or carrying grocery bags, donning sunglasses, a baseball cap, and sweatpants. The woman in the couple wasn’t wearing any makeup and her hair wasn’t styled. The man wasn’t wearing any makeup and didn’t have his hair styled either, but that was usually the case for him. As such, the woman’s off-duty appearance more sharply juxtaposed her on-screen and red carpet appearances than the man’s did. It struck me that she looked a lot worse than him - a lot more tired, a lot more unsightly.

I set my phone on my chest and glanced down at my friend at the other end of the couch, deep in her phone trance.

“Does it ever occur to you,” I started, breaking her hypnosis. “That men are much more naturally attractive than women? Like men don’t have to wear makeup and style their hair or anything to look great, but women have to.”

My friend furrowed her brow and squinted at me, probably trying to figure out whether or not I was serious. I regarded her squint and felt a wave of embarrassment swell in my chest. I was probably asking something impolite. There was probably something wrong with my question, it definitely offended women in some way but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

“Men aren’t more naturally attractive than women,” she replied calmly. “Society just has higher standards of beauty for women and expects them to wear makeup and have styled hair to be beautiful. We expect way too much out of women and way less out of men.”

“Oh right, that’s so true,” I responded dumbly. “I totally forgot about that.” We resumed our respective scrolling.

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I’m twenty-three years old, and as such, am quite passionate about matters that rotate week-to-week. Sometimes it’s more like day-to-day, even hour-to-hour. On a personal level, I sometimes enjoy my day job and feel a sense of ease about my life. Other days, I feel so angry about my circumstances - about the banal aspects and the more serious ones - that my body literally vibrates. I feel a tug on my arm. I want to relocate to the Olympic Peninsula or the California coast. To grow citrus trees and spend my weekends driving out to national parks, devoting my days to getting lost in the expanses of nature and reading in solitude. Other days, the idea of being away from people - from the center of culture, from the center of conversation - feels like an early death.

I’ll often get into a conversation - with a friend, with my boyfriend, or with my mom - and begin contradicting myself. We’ll begin chatting about some topic and the opinion I express will be just one face of a six-sided die, rolled surreptitiously. “Wait, I thought you felt X way about this matter?” they’ll say. “You’ve always said this.” Oh, have I? That was last week though, that was ten minutes ago. I forgot that I felt that way - can you forget how you feel? Also, if you think about it, this is actually just another variation of that opinion, they’re really just two sides of the same coin. I attempt to salvage the shards of my proverbial compass, piecing it back together with Krazy Glue.

In reality, I am an utter fraud. I’m easily influenced - though I prefer to use a word like “receptive” - and my spine is like a cooked noodle. And I feel most like a fraud when I feel most like a woman.

What’s your skincare routine like? Have you used this new lip product? How would you describe your personal style? I’m on the hunt for a good pair of brown boots. I hear these statements uttered to me and around me and I try on different answers and opinions. What kind of woman am I? The one who cares about skincare extensively, or the one who favors minimalism? Am I the type of woman with a codifiable personal style or am I blasé about fashion? Am I someone who spends their free time hunting for a pair of brown boots?

I witness women - in real life and on social media - discuss the disrespect they observe other women facing in this world. Surface-level disrespect - women being held to higher grooming standards than men, for instance. I also listen to them complain about their acne and tease the copy-and-paste Aritzia-style, typical of young Manhattan women in their twenties. I witness them thinking about their appearance meticulously. I wonder how these opinions can all be compatible, then I remember that they aren’t. That these women and I contain conditioned contradictions that we’re usually blind to.

When my feminist consciousness was first stirred, I thought that I had a strong constitution about these matters. About the politics of appearance and beauty. I thought I had cracked my head open and recircuited my brain, using tweezers to rearrange the wires in a way that wouldn’t hurt me. I had thought hard about what opinions the women I wanted to be like had. They probably part their hair like this, and respond to questions like that, I thought. They know beauty isn’t the most important virtue a woman can possess, yet they somehow find a way of appearing beautifully and intentionally in the world. I can do that, I can form opinions like that, I think to myself. I have it all figured out.

And yet, I rush through the process of placing my mobile Cava order so I don’t have to view the automated calorie count. I clam up when someone asks me what I like to wear. I avoid mirrors. None of the clothes in my closet fit properly, and neither do the ones in the stores. Would you ever consider dying your hair? Are you hungry? I had a big lunch so I’m not hungry for dinner. It’s in these moments, when I’m genuinely concerned with these casual questions and statements and the convoluted feelings and responses they elicit from me, when I feel most like a woman, and thus, most like a fraud.

For a long time, I thought I had unchained myself from the hampster wheel - that the women in my life, in popular 2024 media had. I dumbly thought we were all “body positive” now, I thought we all “held space” for others’ appearance preferences. I thought we all agreed that becoming overly concerned with categorizing one’s personal aesthetic is a mad chase of one’s tail, spinning into oblivion. One awkward glance, one off-color comment and I’m thrown back on the wheel. I thought I was debugged. I thought I was immune to all of this. But I have a foundation made of glass. I don’t know what I like to wear, I don’t know how I want to look, I don’t know what type of person I want to be. I don’t know how to feel about anything.

Women - and all people, really - on the internet are always susceptible to the influence of whatever opinion is dominating their algorithm. We are a well-trained hive mind, but it’s a quite narrow hive - with beauty companies, media companies, and internet darlings at the helm. It’s a school of fish that’s always contorting shape, and you must be agile to stay a part of the colony. As such, in this type of environment, having a strong opinion - an immovable, flag-in-the-sand viewpoint - about something, about anything really, is considered righteous. An act of resistance even. And in some respects, it certainly is. It feels quite powerful to mentally download the internet’s fads and hot takes of the week and decide “I align with this” or “I don’t like this at all,” and express that to others. In a world that’s constantly encouraging us to bend - to curve ourselves around the rapidly changing conversations and trends of the moment - attempting to listen to our innermost sentiments on matters offers a path towards self-understanding, rather than conformity.

But I’m nervous about us reaching a point of overcorrection. A point of rigidity, a point of stubbornness about taste. I am the type of person who listens to this kind of music because I dislike this other kind of music. I choose to dress like this because my personal style is like that. I live here because I am not like those people over there. I think like this and don’t understand how you could think like that, nor would I want to. Rigid categories, tidy boxes, all in the name of grounding our minds and bodies.

The truth is that we are all ever-changing people - we are not immovable objects. Every day, we are building our personal constitutions brick-by-brick. We have some core virtues that will remain stable - that should stay stable. Other attitudes will shift. Will take on new shapes. Life is a cycle of gaining information, developing feelings about that information, and choosing to act, only for us to gain new information, develop new feelings, and choose to act again. It never stops. It’s one thing to know yourself, it’s another to close yourself off.

The antidote to flaccid receptivity is not necessarily rigidity, but perhaps, a different kind of receptivity altogether. A kind that is led by empathy and an openness to potentially appreciating, liking, and maybe even understanding the unknown, while staying true to the personal tenets that you know to be true. A receptivity not to sporadic internet opinions, but to thoughtful ideas exchanged between people, on and offline. A receptivity that asks questions and considers new information at a slower pace.

I hope to occupy a space that’s somewhere between rapid change and fixed stubbornness. To know what I value to my core and let that color how I choose to perform, behave, and live. Quiet the noise, but not silence it. Understand that others have endured experiences I will never understand and respond to the world in ways I never would. 

I don’t have to bend to every whim and I don’t need to bury my feet in the sand. We’re all hypocrites, we’re all frauds, we’re all figuring out who we are and when we think we have it figured it out, it will just change again.

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