Long before the Clean Girl era tried to recruit us all, I was already living in a gentle state of aesthetic confusion.
As I’ve always believed that even the lightest endeavors deserve the greatest seriousness, I’ve spent years wrestling with the two opposing aesthetics of Clean Girl and Messy Girl. A private, exhausting duel no one asked me to fight, one that has followed me like a shadow, demanding far more energy than any sane person should ever devote to a question of style.
Back in high school, I worshipped Mary-Kate Olsen with a level of devotion normally reserved for religion or half-marathon preparation. Mary-Kate’s chipped red nails, the destroyed black tights, the oversized sunglasses you could hide a life crisis behind: I copied all of it with the devotion of a penitent. And while I thought looking exhausted was the climax of sophistication (my anxiety level in high school: Basically zero), I used to draw slight dark circles under my eyes with eyeshadow. The irony is that anyone who knows me knows I sleep like the dead every night, twelve hours straight.