{Insightful Sunday} Be who you are.

I've been thinking a lot lately about self-identity & individuality.  For me, growing up, I always felt I had strong inclinations towards certain things, that others were not in the slightest bit interested in.  For instance, I was the only kid in class who liked listening to Nat King Cole, I was delighted when the school started a chess club & I wore my bright yellow DMs with pride every 'own clothes day', despite the sniggers.

I grew up with, not only a strong sense of self, but also, my parents' encouragement for me to 'do what feels right,' regardless of what others are doing.  Having parents who, by other people's standards, were considered 'hippies', I grew up believing in a lot of things people didn't understand & others would simply laugh at.  Manifesting, higher dimensions, spirits, the power of crystals.  You name it, I probably grew up on it.

Of course, back in my day, the other kids at school didn't understand half of these things & so, for the most part, I kept that aspect of my personality quiet.  I would spend time with friends, but then relish time to myself, where I could do my own thing & keep to my own thoughts.  It's probably only been this past year or so, that I've found more & more like minded, or just open minded, people, who I've been able to share these beliefs/interests with.  

Which has been really pleasurable for me, to be able to be open & not constantly self-editing what I can & can't say, for fear of people's reaction.  I think it's terribly sad when, you have a view point, or an interest in something, that is so different from the norm, that you end up quashing it, in case people disagree, or don't understand.  We live in a society that acts as though it's a school playground, everyone constantly vying for attention & acceptance.  Everyone wants to be the cool kid.

We see something on Instagram & suddenly we want it, we want that person's life, their wardrobe, their two thousand followers.  But that's just it, isn't it, we're following someone else, forgetting what makes us happy as individuals.  Rejecting our own choices, in search of someone else's.  Forgetting who we are entirely.  Even I find myself getting lifestyle envy looking through my IG homepage.  Sighing that, whilst I may be in Rome, someone else is in Greece & whilst I may have a deep tan, someone else has skinnier legs.

We've been sucked into conforming without even realising it!  Brainwashed by social media.  It used to be a case of magazines feeding us with subliminal messages, now it's everywhere & with a phone addiction that's strong enough to bring on a mail check every two minutes (just in case, something came through in the last ten seconds since you put your phone down), we're hard pushed to escape its clutches.

I for one want to rediscover what makes me tick, like my love of menswear & skateboards.  Rose quartz.  Always giving in to the desire to, quite literally, stop & smell the roses.  Listening to Ella Fitzgerald.  Getting overly excited about tattoo possibilities.  Harassing my astrologer mother for information & insight.  Touching everything, so I know how it feels, the texture, the shape.  Attempting to fill my brain with more Italian words.  All the little idiosyncrasies that make me me.

Maybe it's time we all put our phones away & rediscover our own homepage.

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Time to let go.

Taking a much needed timeout this weekend.  Sometimes I just really need some alone time.  To be surrounded by silence & create space for my own thoughts to simmer away, peacefully, without distraction.  Time to rest my mind & my body, before the onslaught of my final week here in Rome.

I really am so appreciative to have spent some time back in Italy.  It has served to give me some much needed perspective & perhaps clarified my direction.  Soon I will head home to Berlin.  I like being able to say that.  Home.  Of course, it's only the beginning.  I face an uphill struggle to make things work, but I trust that if it's meant to be, it will be, regardless of any obstacles.

Now really is just time to let go.

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Learning the hard way.

Standing in the middle of Zara's flagship store, on Via del Corso, attempting not to cry, after my & Other Stories sandal decided to publicly fall apart, for the second time, despite a recent trip to the repair shop & becoming wearier still, as the sound of heavy rain began to fall outside, it dawned on me the concept of 'living your truths.'  Namely, don't invest in 'false economies' & 'buy quality, last a lifetime'.

Only a few months prior, when I was living comfortably in the Dordogne, had I started to search for the perfect pair of sandals, to replace the now extinct tan pair I had from Kurt Geiger, which were much loved & had seen me through several summers, until their demise in Sicily, just before Christmas.

Having gone through the lesson of owning less & loving more, I took the matter of restocking my wardrobe perhaps a little too seriously.  I admit I suffer from OCD when it comes to, well, everything really & being able to start from scratch on the wardrobe front, meant I wanted to get it right first time, not waste any money.  Plus, without a secure income, I'm even more conscious of how I spend what I do have.

Shopping has a tendency to bring me both elevation & chronic stress.  I have a magpie outlook, anything shiny, gold, overly patterned & colourful & I'm rubbing it gleefully against my cheeks.  However, I hate staring into my closet, bogeyed & overwhelmed by choices, because everything is so mismatched & nothing seems to actually pair together.  The classic tale of a wardrobe full of clothes & nothing to wear.

Hence, I find it far easier to keep to a more compact, capsule wardrobe, which sticks to a strict colour code, namely white, black, grey, nude & of course, my favourite, gold.  Okay, it sounds clinical & maybe even a little drab, but honestly, nothing brings me more joy than a bit of uniform & when everything can be put together, in seemingly endless combinations, it saves both time & tears.

So, back to my search.  There I am in France, spending far too much time perusing the options online & I find myself pinning all my hopes on the tan Ikaria winged leather sandals from Ancient Greek Sandals.  I've wanted a pair for a few years now & yet, have never quite found myself committing to the purchase.

At €150, they're an investment in something handmade & of good quality.  Something I would wear for many years & that would go with everything in my new stripped back capsule wardrobe.  Yet, with the money nestled in my bank account & my finger hovering over the purchase button, I somehow convinced myself that the delivery time was too long & that I would possibly be in Germany by the time they arrived in France.

I left it.  Eventually arriving in Berlin with solely my beaten up black DMs to see me through.  Then the weather got hot & there was no escaping the need to purchase a pair of sandals.  Feeling a little forced & stressed, I searched through all of my favourite stores in Mitte & eventually, after a week or two, decided on the black leather pair in & Other Stories.  At €55, they were less than half the price of the Ancient Greek pair.

I loved them & wore them every day, until of course, they unceremoniously fell apart one evening, when I was alone at Markthalle Nuen, having just bought myself a glass of wine.  Walking around with a floppy sandal, on your lonesome, in a packed out food market is not fun, let me tell you.  I drowned my sorrows, ate a vegan burger, scoffed a scoop of chocolate sorbet & cycled home in the dark, a little wobbly & very annoyed.

I took them back to & Other Stories, only to be told they'd sold out & therefore couldn't replace them.  I'd have refunded them if it weren't for the love I'd by this time invested in them.  So I got a €20 part-refund instead.  Cue one trip to the repair store in Prenzlauer Berg, €7 & several days sweating it out back in my DMs, waiting on them to be ready, followed by a few weeks of wear before the Zara incident occurred.  Lesson learnt: Don't be fooled into false economies.  Buy the shoes!

In the end, I left Zara with a sassy pair of gold block heeled sandals, which I'd been secretly coveting for a little while.  Having been wearing a combination of flat sandals & DMs for over a year, I felt a little wonky at first, but then, getting into the stride of things, I waltzed out of the store, into the rain, feeling pretty damn good & mentally flipping the bird to the world.

Some things don't need a lot of money spent on them of course, but I think, if you're going to choose to have less possessions, it's probably worth spending a little more & really investing in things that are going to last the test of time & not leave you barefoot & teary eyed.  This is a rule that I think applies to everything, whether it be sartorial, dietary or in the home.

Better to spend a little more on organic & fair-trade, than to ingest the rampant pesticides & chemicals of the cheaper non-organic, have your money contribute to the destruction of our environment or indeed to the hardship of people in other parts of the world.  Equally so, better to 'spend out' on a decent set of top quality knives once, that last you your adult life, than to keep shelling out on cheaper ones that fall apart cutting up your potatoes.

Sometimes it's a painful separation between cash & wallet, but you'll thank yourself in a few years time, when you're sitting comfortably on your beaten up Chesterfield, wondering why you ever even contemplated looking in Ikea.  'Buy quality, last a lifetime.'

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