I'm a serial hobbyist and a serial abandoner, and I will not be taking questions at this time.
What that means, practically speaking, is that I have unfinished things everywhere. A half-painted something. A course I started with intention and… let die in the back of my closet.
But underneath all of that, I've always known who I am. I mean it literally. Since I was a kid, the things I liked have stayed pretty consistent. Even when I abandoned them for the sake of fitting in or seeking approval, they would always resurface. I just didn't have the word for it until recently.
That word is taste.
When I was young and bored at home, I'd cut furniture out of newspaper ads, draw a floor plan of my imaginary future house in my black and white composition notebook, and decorate the whole thing. Brown furniture, blue accents, wood and metal mixed together, calm. No one asked me to do this. There was no Pinterest board or mood board app. It was just me and a pair of scissors and apparently very specific opinions about interior design at eight years old.
As a pre-teen, I got heavily into what I now know was the "preppy girl" look. Collared shirts, straight leg pants, headbands, striped everything. In 2006, I had no idea it was a trend. I thought I was reinventing myself.
I was adding things to my Walmart cart like I knew exactly what I had to do to become this person. I leaned into the aesthetic so hard because I already knew it would be mine long after the trend faded.
And yes, aesthetic shifts are heavily trend-driven: terms like "office siren" or "mid-century Tuscan home" come and go. But what determines whether something is taste or a trend is what you do with it once the hype dies, and how it makes you feel when nobody's talking about it anymore.
There's a difference between seeing something and wanting it, versus seeing something and feeling like it already belonged to you. Copying taste is external: you pick it up, you put it down when it stops being cool, and you move on. Developing taste is more like returning somewhere you've been before. You find a version of the thing, and even if you can't fully execute it yet, some part of you just knows it's supposed to be yours.
I’ve been collecting evidence of a self I'd be building on for the rest of my life, and I know this because I can name it. The through-line is embarrassingly consistent once you see it.
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Thinking through Pink music videos on the elementary school bus in 2001. Thinking through Don Toliver music videos on a plane in 2025.
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Parachute windbreaker pants in 2002. Six refined versions of that same instinct hanging in my closet in 2026.
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Mixing body washes together in 2007 trying to get the perfect vanilla coconut smell. Eventually just making the fragrance myself, inside my own brand, with exactly the right hit of cashmere, vanilla, and floral. (Shameless product plug, here.)
Same person. Finally with the tools to match.
The gap between recognizing that and actually being able to do anything about it was just circumstance. Access. Money. Confidence. In every life stage before now, I had the vision and not the means. Which, honestly, is kind of useful information, because if the desire showed up before any realistic path to executing it did, that's not a phase. Phases need the conditions to survive. This was here before the conditions existed.
So now the question is what to do with that. And my answer is to go back.
Think about what you were drawn to before you had an algorithm doing it for you. Before you were a consumer first and a person second. Because that's what happens when you're constantly buying into the next thing: you stop being able to hear yourself. Everything starts to feel like yours because it was marketed to feel that way, and suddenly you don't actually know what you like, you just know what you've been shown.
Your taste is still in there. It's just buried under a lot of purchases and trends and other people's opinions about what's worth wanting right now.
You get more deliberate about what stays and what was just convenient. You start making choices that your younger self would recognize, instead of choices that make sense to explain to other people.
The practice is returning, on purpose, to what was always there. Turns out the girl with the scissors and the composition notebook had it figured out, but she was just waiting on the rest of me to catch up.
