Stop the shaming. It's not working.

Can we meet in the middle instead?

I think I stumble into things. It’s not imposter syndrome. I’m not saying I’m talentless. But sometimes I have a good gut and just go forward—I’m good at “progress not perfection.” And sure, that may be how I mistakenly ended up in law school, but it’s also how I wrote and published a novel. And started this newsletter. My friend Dina said “hey you should get on Substack.” I do things by closing my eyes and jumping in.

Don’t get me wrong, I know and love fashion. But I largely approached this like “what do I wish I could read?”

And as a consequence, I missed some basics.

Like it only recently occurred to me that there are, with exceptions like

The Wardrobe Edit

, two kinds of style/fashion newsletters: ones that are pro-shopping and ones that are against shopping. There are the links and collages and recommendations and state of the states and delights. And then there are deep dives and slow downs and big think-y ideas and probing questions.

My friend Tia (

Tiia VM

) recently wrote this:

I still care about clothes, but the system is broken and I can’t quite find my place in it. I can’t take part in fashion and style specific social media anymore, I can’t subscribe to shopping newsletters, I can’t browse online stores or resale platforms, I can’t read trend reports. I’ve had to leave all of that behind because these outlets trigger me and my shopping addiction, and after an initial thrill they would take me back to that dark place I’ve tried to climb out of for the last fifteen years. I can only stay engaged with style content that’s humane and vulnerable. Everything else has had to go and it hasn’t been easy to quit, but the reward has been worth it. Not wanting to shop all the time is pretty awesome.

I feel that I’m on the cusp of moving from one discourse to another. For some time I considered myself a personal style writer, but at some point I began to identify more with the sustainable style discourse, which can be quite preachy (guilty as charged!), some of it veers on self-congratulatory (I’m trying really hard to avoid this), and it can get repetitive and depressing. How many different ways can we talk about buying less and the myriad problems within the fashion industry?

For me it’s not that I “can’t find my place.” Oh no. I’m just all over the place. I enjoy both! And I didn’t decide on any specific camp to start here, what with my “whatever I long to read, I’ll write or ask” approach. My newsletter reflects my own vacillation.

But is that a bad thing? Or is it just an acknowledgement of the complexity of a thing? Reading some passionate POVs here has made me take some time to ask myself: Do I have to pick a team?

I know there are serious issues at stake. But policing each other isn’t the way!