I have never felt beautiful

Not as a teenager trying to fit in. Not as a bride. Not as the corporate version of myself, or the hippie, or the art student. Each phase came with its own wardrobe, and I wore all of it.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What nobody tells you though is that you have to actually be the beholder first.

I am creative. Deeply so. I see beauty in everything around me. I see it in objects, in spaces, in the way people move. But fashion always confused me. The translation from what I see and feel to what I put on my body never came naturally. So I borrowed identities instead. Wore the costume of whoever I was supposed to be in that chapter as a way of belonging to wherever I was trying to belong.

Now I am the most free I have ever been. No role to dress for. No version of myself to perform. Two kids, a changed body, a life that is finally and completely mine.

And weirdly, that freedom hasn’t translated to fashion at all.

“I borrowed identities instead. Wore the costume of whoever I was supposed to be.”

Paulo Coelho wrote about a shepherd boy who dreams of treasure buried at the Egyptian pyramids. He travels across continents, through deserts, through heartbreak, to find it. And when he finally arrives, it turns out that the treasure was back home, buried under the tree where he slept as a child.

Everything I am looking for was actually mine from the beginning. Whether that was my confidence, validation, or sense of style.

The language was always mine. I just spent years looking for it in the wrong wardrobes. In what a bride should wear, what a creative director should look like, what a woman in her phase of life is supposed to project. But the treasure was never there.

In this phase of life, I feel more arrived at myself. Surrounded by incredible women who are unapologetically themselves. Women like Viktoria, whose style has changed and evolved over the years but has always, unmistakably, been hers. Never a costume and always an expression.

That is the only kind of style worth having. And I think I’m finally starting to understand what mine is.