Bad for the Brand

The other day, I woke up feeling extra edgy. I wore black, leather, and eyeliner as I stomped out of the door, determined to milk my edginess for the day, to be a physical manifestation of how I felt and how I’d once been told I come off as.

About two minutes into my daily coffee run, it fell apart when I couldn’t help but kneel and play peek-a-boo with the toddler in the queue in front of me as she stared up at me with her big eyes. After the toddler waddled out, dragged by a father juggling several coffees, I sprung up and chuckled to myself thinking, “That was bad for the brand”. Then I silently laughed at myself for thinking that, because, realistically, no one cares that I played with a child. Wearing a leather jacket didn’t make me any less of a softy.

It’s this spotlight effect that makes us feel like we always perform our way through life, that we feel like we have some sort of a reputation to uphold. However, with time, I’ve come to realise that while we can laugh at ourselves for moments where we take ourselves so seriously, there is nothing wrong with a bit of performative self-expression. 

Having entered the final stages of adolescence, I have long tried to understand exactly what defined and constituted this stage of life, a stage that has long been given this weight and special status in popular culture. This romanticisation of the transition from teenagehood into your early twenties feels somewhat deceptive: no one talks about the all-encompassing and utterly overwhelming sense of just not really knowing yourself.

In your late teens and early twenties, you’re doing most things for the first time. One of the best examples of this is entering a new environment such as uni, in which there is a pressure to both conform and stand out, to be different and know yourself, while still fitting in. To have an identity that is distinctly yours, as long as it is one people will find attractive. Finding that middle ground, calibrating some kind of balance between who you are and how you want to be perceived, is exactly how I’d characterise this stage of life. Some famous person on a podcast I listened to years ago described youth perfectly: adolescence is a time where you find yourself “shopping for a personality”. You see traits in others, view them as aspirations, and try them out for yourself. Some feel like they’re meant just for you, and they stick. Others don’t. 

Everyone has had embarrassing phases. The ‘canon event’ may include a hyperfixation on some kind of depressive philosophy (Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky seem to be popular choices), getting into some ‘alternative’ artist (who is actually very well known), and swearing that no one understands you. We laugh now, but, at the time, it's all we wanted to be seen as. I’d be willing to bet that whatever literature you read and music you listened to shaped you at least a little, even if it was performative. It’s okay and important to embrace the idea that we change, especially at this age. 

My parents still joke about the very visceral shift in how I carried myself the second I stepped foot in St Regulus Hall, where I lived my first year. The urgency with which I began to curate every aspect of myself, anxious to do everything deliberately to grasp a sense of control over how I was being perceived. I guess I, like many, saw this as a pivotal opportunity to reinvent myself and escape the image I’d been stuck with in school. I saw my fresher self as the ‘best’ and coolest version of me because I learnt to dress like those around me and speak like them. Ultimately, though, that wasn’t really me. However, it certainly brought me closer to who I am now, and we will continue to change and look back on our silly younger selves.  

We are the cumulative of every experience we’ve had, every choice we’ve made, whether or not it reflects the truest version of ourselves. Even if performative acts of self-identification are just inherently ‘trial and error’, they are the best (and really only way) of knowing yourself. So forgive yourself for the eyeliner phase, and maybe the next time you’re feeling edgy, put on that leather jacket and go live it.

Image from Wikimedia Commons