Memory Lane: Adventures in Style

 "I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then," - Alice in Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll).

Since drifting away from the Goth scene about ten years ago, I have dabbled in a variety of fashions and subcultures. Nowadays I have a much better understanding of how I want to look, and it does indeed incorporate many of these inspirations (though sometimes only as a vague nod, perhaps recognisable only to myself - but then maybe that's as it should be). But for a long time I found myself at a loss - I love so many different styles and have so many inspirations, and I found them so conflicting that I couldn't even think how to combine them.

I would rather be inspired by these things and use that inspiration to create my own style, than attempt to tick all the boxes and fit myself into one category or another, but where I was deeply involved in a specific subculture for a long period of time, I found it very strange for a while not to 'belong'. 

Post-Goth, my first move was to fling myself onto the interwebs and try to find another subculture that spoke to me in the same way. In some ways, this taught me a lot. For example, I spent some time as a dreadheaded faux-hippie and I did commit myself fairly whole-heartedly (went vegan, stopped shaving), which, whilst long-term turned out not to be for me, did teach me a lot of things about the way I relate to my body, and how ingrained beauty standards can be.

But I digress.

Now that I feel I'm finally moving on from this period of intensive introspection and learning how to dress purely for myself, I thought I'd share some pictures from the road thus far - a few of the different identities I've tried on over the years.

My awkward journey through style

Goth girl, aged 14-21 approx

I have always loved the Goth look, but I gave up on being a Goth (after seven years immersing myself in all things spooky) because there were more and more elements of the scene that were no longer appealing to me. Plus I was finding that my image and appearance dominated my every waking thought, and I wanted a break from spending each and every moment trying to be the Queen of Darkness.

This is one of those rainbow skirts I wish I hadn't got rid of. And that's my mum!

Gutter faerie, aged 22-23

The year or so I spent exploring this style/lifestyle did help me in many ways. It gave me a break from fixating on my appearance and I rediscovered meditation, exercise and art. I still love bright colours, tie-dye and a kind of earthy faerie vibe.

Strega/mori/witchy-inspired interlude, 24-ish

I enjoyed this, and again there are elements of this in my style today, but it eventually came to feel like I was wearing a costume all the time, which got old fast. It did, however, gel with my interest in fae and folklore (and when I say 'interest' I mean 'obsession'), and satisfied the lingering Gothstalgia.

Attempted normality, 24-ish

A short-lived phase of experimenting with a simple, casual kind of style, inspired by books like How To Be Parisian and fashion bloggers on Instagram. This had a few slightly different iterations: folksy, boho, minimalist, rock chick. Okay, once I got the hang of mainstream fashion proportions ('mom jeans'!), it was much easier and quicker to choose an outfit and get dressed in the mornings. The only problem was that I didn't feel a pared-down, mainstream style said much about me as a person. Frankly, I was bored.

This style did have a resurgence around the time I met Dai, when I was newly on the dating scene and scared of presenting myself as 'too quirky'. I'm not sure how surprised Dai really was when once we got to know each other I quickly devolved back into my actual self (henna! harem pants! waistcoats!) but he took it rather well.

Le geek c'est chic, 25-ish

At this point I'd really given up hope and was just kind of substituting fandoms for a personality. Expressing yourself is v simple when all your T-shirts function as billboards. However, I was changing my hair colour on a monthly basis and I did love that (not so much the upkeep, though).

I reverted to Attempted Normality as a new mum, and I've been slowly foraying back into the realms of clothing that lights me up. I'd become keen to hide, afraid of garnering attention, but I'm pleased to report that those feelings are decidedly on the wane. I don't need a fanfare of approval and a cascade of likes for every outfit, but I also don't mind not blending into the crowd. (I don't take outfit photos any more generally speaking, but the odd waistcoat appreciation post finds its way onto my Instagram, if you're curious.)

I feel like I've been a bunch of different people over the years. And I kind of like them all, in different ways and for different reasons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the end result that is ME is a mishmash of all of these things. My look isn't everybody's cup of tea, I guess, but it doesn't have to be. That's kind of the point, I think.

Fiction: Gifts for Witches

An excerpt from 2015's unfinished NaNoWriMo novel... I may have to try to pick the thread of this one back up sometime.

It was almost midnight.

Mel had been waiting on the end of the street for twenty minutes, the chill of the ground slowly seeping through her cherry-red Doc Martens, her breath trailing from her lips in a sparkling white haze. The latticework of tree branches cast her thin pale face in starlight and shadow, like a lace tablecloth. The night smelt of bonfire smoke and dying fireworks, wet leaf-mulch and frostbitten grass.

She squeezed the hagstone that hung on its ragged red string around her neck, tracing its worn surface with the pads of her fingertips. The hagstone wasn’t magic. If anything, it was antimagic, a piece of nature so ancient, so stolid, that it couldn’t be charmed, cursed, tricked or fooled. Hagstones were for breaking glamours, finding things. Mel figured the only thing you couldn’t find, by looking the hole worn through its centre, was normality.

Mel had brought a backpack, heavy with an assortment of oddities. Mostly they were gifts. A more correct word, perhaps, would have been ‘offerings’, but Mel rejected the terminology of outdated deities and hippy-dippy wannabe priestesses. In the backpack there were two perfume bottles (both green, thick vintage glass that sparkled like cats’ eyes) and two jam jars carefully washed and filled with dirt and moss and secrets on tiny torn up bits of notepaper. Witches liked secrets. For your everyday run-of-the-mill magical workings and/or application to the Wyrd, such a collection would probably have been perfectly acceptable payment.

Mel was well aware that what she was going to ask for tonight was far beyond run-of-the-mill.

So in addition to the four bottles and jars, she had also packed her diary from the year she turned thirteen, a ball of indigo wool with purple lurex sparkles, a suicide note she wrote in the back of a trashy paperback when she was seventeen, a handful of snail shells wrapped carefully in bubble wrap, a magpie feather that was not quite black and not quite green, and a small jar of lime marmalade.

There were other things in the backpack as well, but Mel was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

“You’re early,” said a voice from behind her left shoulder. It was a thin voice, a wind voice, the skittering of dead leaves across tarmac.

“No, I’m not,” Mel said. She was pleased to note that she sounded calmer than she felt. “You’re half an hour late.”

A silence. Not an absent silence, but a weighty, broody silence.

Mel rolled her eyes and turned around. There was no one there.

“I’m not falling for that, either,” she said, looking very hard at a slant of shadow between the thick trunk of the old tree and the wall of the last house. In the sickly streetlight shine, the jagged shadow might well have been a shoulder, an elbow, a long narrow hand with bony fingers. Or it might not. “What’s the matter? You can call up a storm and read the bones of the earth but you can’t tell the time?”

The witch stepped out from behind the tree.

Sort of.

What actually happened was that shadows on tree bark and dead leaves and dust and starlight shifted and congealed into the shape of a person. Mel saw this briefly, and then forced herself to unsee it. Even in Elbury, where magic walked the streets and sang in the air and sludged through the sewers like blood and piss, where you were brought up knowing – not believing but knowing – that there were faeries at the bottom of the garden, it didn’t pay to let yourself see things that your mind couldn’t possibly be expected to make sense of.

Mel had tried to use that excuse for her algebra homework one time. Hadn’t worked.

The witch took a step towards her. A car came around the corner behind them, its headlights flickering across the trunks of the slender trees lining the road and casting zoetrope shadows across the witch’s face. Mel held the witch’s gaze.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” said the witch. She had a tapestry bag slung over her arm, its colours faded with age. She stroked it absently with the other hand as she walked towards Mel, as though the bag were a restless animal she needed to comfort. Her footsteps made no sound on the brittle golden carpet of frost and leaf.

“My name’s Mel,” Mel offered awkwardly.

The witch cocked her head to one side, birdlike. “I know,” she said. Her voice was reedy and distant, like a night bird calling across a mountain lake, a thin and haunting note that made the hairs on the back of Mel’s neck stand on end.

“What do I call you?” Mel prompted. Witches were naturally curious; sometimes she wondered if they agreed to do any of the things they did just so that they could look at you, watch you, study you. It wasn’t unusual, in Elbury, to see a witch standing in the street, hypnotised by the falling rain or the steam off your coffee or dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. It made it difficult to convince them to get to the point.

The other trouble with witches was their erratic behaviour. Don’t talk to strangers was good advice on the whole, but it took on particular resonance in this town. Consorting with witches was not something that one generally did. Especially if you liked all your fingers and toes where they were and preferred not being a frog - or in an oven.

“You can call me Bijou,” said the witch. “It’s not my name. But it’ll do.”

Mel nodded.

The witch had dusky brown skin and a grey pea coat that was rather too big for her, so that she appeared to nestle in its folds like a bat wrapped in its own wings. Her hair was a cascade of dreadlocks, once dyed blue, now a faded greyish-teal. She wore a very long scarf, green and black striped, that moved with the wind, although not always in the direction it should have done. Her fingers were thin, clutching, bent like twigs.

Mel unzipped the bag, the sound unusually loud in the still night air, and took out the jars one by one, handing them over. The witch took each without word or expression, her long pointed fingers gliding over the glass. She held them close to her face, sniffed them, shook them, peered at them intently. Each one vanished into the depths of her pea coat, and she looked at Mel expectantly, waiting for more. Mel’s nerves thrummed with tension. The price for what she was asking was high. She knew that. She wouldn’t let it stop her, not now.

They took my sister, she thought, but she cut that line of thinking dead before any more words could form. Not now, not here. It was too dangerous, too raw.

The witch lifted her head abruptly in a sharp, jerky motion and sniffed at the air, her nostrils flaring. “Angry thoughts,” she whispered. “Desperation. And fear… a bitter brew. Delicious. Delicious.” She leaned towards Mel, angling herself downwards like a heron pecking at weeds.

Mel breathed slowly and deeply and tried not to make any sudden movements. She was suddenly far too hot in her winter coat. “You know what I’m asking?" she said softly. "You know why I came?”

Bijou looked down at her. The planes of her face now seemed predatory, and her mouth was pulled into a thin white line. “I know why you came.” The words were an exhalation, almost a sigh. “I can help you. Of course I can. But… far safer for you to simply… forget.”

“No. I can’t forget. I won’t forget.” Impatient, Mel offered up the lime marmalade next, breaking the tension, and Bijou hummed and nodded in what might have been approval.

Then the snail shells. Bijou accepted them carefully, her sharp fingernails pricking the pustules of the bubble wrap as she transferred them gingerly to an inside pocket of her voluminous coat. The diary, its pink cover orange under the streetlights, a year’s worth of pre-teen secrets and outpourings, lipstick kisses and bad poetry. The suicide note, which the witch pressed to her face; inhaled deeply. The feather. The wool.

The wool went into the tapestry bag. Mel was careful to look away when the bag was opened and she kept her gaze averted until it was closed.

There were all sorts of witches. They did mostly the same thing, to be fair, but they went about it in different ways. There were cyber witches, who drew their magic from the clacking of keys and the sizzle of circuit boards. There were city witches, who walked widdershins down alleyways and drew sigils in spray paint. There were not many kinds of witch who carried their power in a tapestry bag, which wriggled, like a kitten, when it thought Mel wasn’t looking.

Mel thought about asking what sort of witch she was hiring, but she didn’t know how to phrase the question without giving offense and she had a feeling she’d be happiest not knowing. She wanted three things, three very simple things, really – an answer, a map, and a key.

Happy in my Skin

Fifteen years ago I hated the way I looked. I thought I was fat. I thought I was ugly. I thought that having bad skin and flat hair made me not only unlikeable but scarcely worthy of personhood. Like many young people of a similar age, I obsessed about it. I starved. I binged. I created weird food rituals. I exercised continually. I asked for a treadmill for Christmas. I spent a fortune on lotions and potions for my skin, my hair, my imaginary cellulite (I have real cellulite now, turns out it's fine). I wrote endless lists of ways to improve myself. One that I wrote, aged thirteen-ish, includes the bullet point, 'get boob job'.

For a teenage girl, this wasn't unusual. An awful lot of my friends were doing the same thing.

In my mid-teens I discovered Goth and alternative fashion. This gave me a new focus, and it took me a few more years to realise that covering your issues with make-up is not the same as confronting them. There was a stage in my life when I wouldn't go outside without make-up on. I was happy to spend an hour just on my hair and make-up in the mornings, because I didn't feel 'acceptable' without it. Oh, the irony, when I was relating to subcultures that were spawned from punk, the original fuck-you to standards of appearance laid out by society and the media.

At the time, I didn't realise that my obsession with my clothes, hair and make-up was, for me, a different symptom of the same problem. I was still spending an enormous chunk of my time - and money - fussing over my appearance. I thought that because I was eating three square meals a day, and had the confidence to wear weird clothes in public, that I was OK. The fact that I still hated the person I was underneath, the face I was born with, somehow didn't even register with me.

At around the time I drifted out of the Goth scene, I discovered body positivity. I had always considered myself a feminist - of course I believed in equal rights for women - but I had never stopped to think what it really meant. Not just to me, personally, but in general. If feminists were fighting for equal rights, what were they fighting against?

One of the issues raised by feminism, I learned, was one that had taken up a large portion of my teen years - beauty standards. The more I read up, the more I became horrified that it had just genuinely never occurred to me that there was more to my life than what I looked like.

Don't get me wrong. I care about how I look. I like to look good. But I'm trying to accept that my idea of 'good' is not necessarily going to be anyone else's idea of good. 

When I was a little girl, my mother tells me I had no interest at all in fashion. From my own memories, this isn't entirely true. I had no concept of being stylish, or even of looking acceptable in the eyes of my peers, but I had strong ideas of what I liked (flower patterns. Rainbow colours. Shiny fabric. People with bright-coloured hair. Dreadlocks. Things with ponies on. Some of these still hold true. Some do not).

Then, growing up, I went through the hideous stage I think many of us do in secondary school - suddenly realising that I didn't 'fit'. I wore a baggy Green Day hoodie I had on loan from my friend Topaz. My hair was cut short and bleached blonde (attempting to emulate Mary Stuart Masterson in the film Some Kind of Wonderful, which I watched approximately 1000 times when I was laid up on the couch with a neon-pink cast around my broken ankle, aged thirteen). I liked rock music and dance music and ripped jeans and obnoxious plastic earrings and shell jewellery and skate shoes and None Of This was acceptable to my classmates, who proceeded to make my life a living hell.

I left school very young, but the damage, as it were, was done *turns up the melodrama*. I had learned that the things I liked (weird clothes, Bleeding Edge Goth dolls and going to the bookshop after school with Topaz to buy manga and L.J. Smith books) were enough to make me unacceptable to others. Even in my Goth years, when I was generally thoroughly enjoying myself, I was aware that I had 'guilty pleasures', mostly musically. And yes, from time to time, I got slated for them.

I have always tried to cram myself into the 'right way' to do things according to however I was presenting myself at the time. So the most important step so far on my journey to feeling comfortable in my skin, life, and wardrobe, has been to seek out and embrace all the little, guilty, nerdy, secret interests I have stamped on and squashed and bring them into the light. To stop staring into my closet with a growing sense of horror and instead fling on the nearest, cleanest tee and jeans and go write something, draw something, cook something, go outside.

The next stage is where I'm at now - to stop treating pleasure in clothing and enjoyment of aesthetics as if it's something shameful, but just one of many facets that make up a whole person. Instead of throwing on the nearest clothes, I can take pride in putting together an outfit - not to appear acceptable, not to fit in, but to my own standards, what looks and feels good to me, because I'm happy in my skin at last.

Advice from a Past Self

Ferreting through some of my old writing recently has brought me face to face with the fact that I've been wandering in circles for some time, mentally speaking, rehashing some of the same old thoughts and ideas about style and identity. For example, I wrote the below in 2015, and then apparently didn't take my own advice *head in hands, gently screaming*

It's deeply frustrating that I have been doing this same kind of navel-gazing for so long, and I can imagine that it's nearly as irritating to read about as it is to live through. I really, sincerely am grateful that you have continued to bear with me. 

I have mentioned on numerous occasions the time in my life I secretly think of as the Flailing Years, when I moved from being an enthusiastic-if-slightly-clueless goth girl to, well, whatever it is I am today. With hindsight, progressing from one style and sense of identity to another is not, in the grand scheme of things, a very big deal. At the time, it was, for various reasons, petrifying and somewhat hideous. 

Mistakes were made; money squandered; even the most patient loved ones grew tired of hearing me wail 'I don't know who I am any mooooooore!', not least because the only advice they could give ('Just wear what you want!') seemed to fall on deaf ears. (You can't just wear what you want when you haven't the foggiest idea what you want in the first place!)

I don't know whether or not anyone else shifting between styles has found themselves tripped up by an all-or-nothing approach to things like I did; or has stayed up into the wee hours endlessly trying to dissect - both out loud and in journals - what the hell kind of person they actually, deep down, really wanted to be. But I'm assuming that there are more of us out there! And for those people, having flailed my way through the deepest depths of self-absorption, frustration and confusion, I can now present a few tips that helped, at least for me - stuff I wish someone had said to me at the time. I'm sure a lot of this will sound really obvious to other people, but it wasn't to me.

1. You can't buy a new you. What will actually happen, if you're much like me, is that you'll end up with a pile of extremely strange clothes - none of which go together, most likely - and in a year's time you'll end up getting rid of half of it whilst wondering why you didn't buy a new computer game or a weekend away instead. During that year, you will become increasingly stressed that none of these purchases actually made you feel any better, and go on to feel thoroughly suffocated by the amount of random, unwearable stuff you now have. So first and foremost, limit your clothing purchases. If your wardrobe fills you with unhappiness and lingering dread, then OK, go out and buy a few things that you could stand to wear right now. But other than that, put down the credit card. 
2. Instead of buying beautiful clothes that you will look at in awe and never, ever wear, spend the money on something better. Better, you ask? What's better? Something that's meaningful to you. What are your passions? Your hobbies? Get a new book or a new moisturiser or cactus or pair of headphones. Take a trip somewhere, to a gig or a new gallery. Get away from thinking about style and subcultures for a bit. If you really, really don't know what's important to you right now, go basic. Take yourself to see a film. Buy yourself a coffee or a box of doughnuts (I have a loose definition of meaningful, all right?!). Why? Because the best way I've found to dig yourself out of a style identity crisis is to get to know yourself better, under the clothes (not like that, you perv).
3. Stay away from the internet. And stop wandering despairingly around Topshop while you're at it. Oh, the hours I wasted waiting to come across the one person or picture or item that would be The Ultimate Piece Of Inspiration, and make my sense of identity suddenly click into place. 
4. And maybe start browsing things that are relevant to you as a whole person, not just how you want to look. If you're not as all-or-nothing as I could sometimes be, you might not have jettisoned large chunks of your personality to focus more on fashion. But if you have, now's a good time to start gathering them back in. In other words, if there's ever a time when looking into a fandom is a good idea, it's now.
5. Make something. Anything. I literally don't care if you're drawing stickmen. Creation is cathartic, it distracts you from obsessing, and it gives you something better to talk about than your shoe wishlist.
6. Focus on moments. When I was paying most attention to my appearance, I had a tendency to try to watch myself as if from the outside. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, my attention was on how I looked to others whilst I was doing it, not how it felt from the inside. I'm not saying that it doesn't matter at all how you look. If it's important to you, that's cool. But I don't think that in the short human lifespan, the most important thing should ever be how you looked while you were here. If you can, try to pay attention to what's going on around you, what your senses are telling you, how you feel; not picturing how you look in this particular light or how you're going to write this up for your blog later. Be there for the experience (and if you then realise you don't like where you are, make your excuses and leave).
7. Think about your values. What's important to you? Feminism? Animal welfare? Politics? Self-expression? Art? Many of the groundbreaking subcultures we know of today came about through a political protest or music genre. As you look deeper into what your values are, you may find one of these movements that speaks to you. Or you may just get to know yourself a bit better, which plays a big part in finding your own style.
8. What drew you to your starting-point subculture in the first place? Was it just the look? If so, what elements would you want to keep (silhouettes, colour schemes, distressed elements, fabrics etc.)? Were there other factors, like music, art, literature or friendships? Chances are, you can change your style without 'losing' any of those. Think about what drew you in, why you want to change, and what elements from that subculture or style you want to 'keep'. I wrote this post to help me think about what 'spoke' to me from the styles I had an interest in.
9. Similarly, try to work out what you want from your wardrobe. Be honest with yourself! I had to accept that, though I love fancy looks on other people, my priorities are comfort and freedom of movement, so six-inch-heels and corsets aren't for me - at least not for everyday wear. How do you feel in what you're wearing right now? How would you like to feel? Could there be something you need to accept, or change? It helps to stick to these ideas when you make new purchases - if you know you feel most comfortable in simple, casual clothes, you can buy as many frilly dresses as you want but they'll probably just sit in the wardrobe. If you prefer to wear black but feel like you 'should' try colour - erm, why? They're your clothes; you're the one who has to pay for them, accommodate them and wear them (or not).
10. Experiment privately. Mistakes will happen. Take photos if you want to remember what you wore or how it made you feel, but wait a while before you post them online or you may cringe later. And we've all had times when you realise halfway through the day that you feel ridiculous in your outfit. Sometimes this will happen and it can't be helped, unless you want to wear the same clothes every day (I practically do, actually). But for important events, try to stick to what you know and what you feel good in, at least until you've got more of a handle on your wardrobe. (And if you do end up realising you looked like a lunatic at X party, try not to stress. Goodness knows, we've all been there. In my case, repeatedly.)
11. One of the most important things for me, which I have alluded to in several of the other tips here, is to try not to obsess. When I realised that my interests were shifting away from Gothdom, my style then became almost all I could think about. If I wasn't this person any more, then who the hell was I?! Trying to force myself into a new cookie-cutter category - even if I had to make one up myself - so that I could relax became my mission. It was only when I gave up, out of sheer frustration, and resigned myself to wearing pyjamas and nerd T-shirts forever, that things like my values, passions and actual priorities became visible to me again. Be patient with yourself.
12. Don't beat yourself up. When I was a Goth, I thought I'd be happy dressing that way for my whole life. I loved it. So when I started to feel that it wasn't for me any more, I was upset. I felt irritated with myself for not having enough 'commitment', and tried to stay Goth longer even though I was really starting to feel like I wanted to move on and try other ways of expressing myself. What worked for me in the end was making sure to 'bring with me' the things I had discovered through Goth culture that I still enjoy - music, cool boots, certain films, dark literature and many other things - and also not to dismiss that part of my past. Just because something wasn't permanent doesn't mean it wasn't interesting or fun or exciting at the time, and brushing it off as 'a phase' feels like belittling that part of my past and who I was. I try to look fondly on who I was then and who I am now.

A Style Manifesto for the Awkward and Confused

A quick note - my runner-up story Green Witch is now live on the lovely new solar-powered Solarpunk Storytelling website. You can read it here, but please do check out the winning stories as well, they are absolutely excellent, so inspiring and optimistic.

 I wrote this circa 2016, when I was figuring out that the goth scene wasn't for me any longer but couldn't decide what, exactly, I was going to do next. I had to laugh when I dug it up, as most of these points are still pretty relevant to me today. I'll let you guess which (although I've never yet succeeded in getting Dai to fill in any quizzes. Except the sorting hat quiz on Pottermore. He got Slytherin).

• Stay in bed too late and leave yourself half an hour of getting-ready time. If you like, follow this up by staring into your wardrobe in abject terror for fifteen minutes before grabbing yesterday's clean-ish clothes off the floor. Don't forget to pull on a bobble hat in an attempt to disguise your still-wet hair.
• Wear the same seven items over and over, because every time you experiment with anything else it seems to go horribly wrong and you look like a mad bag lady. Not in a cool Tavi Gevinson way or a rock'n'roll misfit way. Just someone people wouldn't sit next to on the bus.
• Is your predilection for comfy clothes because of your punk rock middle finger up to beauty standards, or because you couldn't be arsed to shave your legs? (Again.) It's a chicken and egg kind of deal, right? Feel quite smug that being a lazy bastard helps reflect your body positive values. 
• Read fashion blogs and feel even more confused than you were to begin with. Ditto 'street style' websites. Become convinced that 'high fashion' seems to mean 'buying clothes that don't match each other or fit properly' and wonder why it only looks socially acceptable when someone else does it.
• Make Pinterest boards and take online style quizzes in an attempt to define your personal style. Stare at them for hours in the hopes of discovering their deeper meaning. 
• Overthink dressing for every social occasion so that you always end up over- or under-dressed and feeling vaguely uncomfortable.
• Decide you don't care at all about how you look. Live in oversized men's T-shirts and baggy jeans for a month and then realise you are horribly bored.
• Rectify this by veering to the other extreme! Throw on fifteen clashing items and hot pink lipstick in an attempt to express your inner self. Realise you look insane.
• Try minimalism, and end up looking as though you're going to a board meeting when actually you have a movie night with friends.
• Stare creepily at passers-by in bewildered attempts to 'get inspiration'. Stare until you make them nervous. Maybe take notes.
• Trawl around shopping centres to try and discover what you are 'drawn to'. Come home with Harry Potter knickers, another bobble hat, a grey jumper identical to your ten other grey jumpers, and seven books. 
• Talk your loved ones' ears off about your crisis of identity. Force them to fill in quizzes about your best features and when they last saw you 'looking fabulous'. 
• Continue to wear your same seven items (and Harry Potter knickers). Pat yourself on the back for being able to decide that you LIKE these seven things (sorry, 'pieces'). You've come such a long way.