It was never a mindset issue
And I spent fifteen years trying to fix the wrong thing.
Listen, I know who I am. I always have.
So why, then, do I have history of crippling low self worth for someone who is more self aware than the majority of the planet? Great question. The old me would have immediately started excavating my childhood trauma; from primary school to my home life and everything in between. But the me you’re yapping to now? She’ll tell you what was actually the cause of it.
You see, it was never a mindset issue. It was never a therapy…thing. No matter how many years I spent wrapped up in the personal development space, trying to heal what was wrong with me, having block sessions of CBT, diving deeper into my Chiron wound in my astrology chart - none of it made any difference.
Was I really that broken? Or was everyone else talking absolute shit about how much therapy and healing seemed to fix them?
As it turns out, I was never broken (yay! good to know). I was simply lacking in expression.
I was trying my hardest every night to meditate out of the anxiety my body seemed to be flooded by on a daily basis. I used EFT religiously, I tried to journal on my feelings - and even lasted 9 months of doing that one daily. But none of it really helped me feel any different about myself.
But one day I started to reflect on my life and I realised that I hadn’t always felt that way about myself.
When I left high school and studied the one thing that felt like I had a purpose in this lifetime - fashion, design and communication - I seemed to move differently. I held myself differently. I imagined my future surrounded by towering skyscrapers in New York City, editing my favourite magazine for a living. I didn’t care that anyone around me told me it was a pipedream and would fail before it even had a chance to form. If I’m honest with myself, it wasn’t even about the end goal for me - I just wanted to surround myself with curiosity, inspiration of all different types, and people who lived their life without ever putting themselves in a glass cage. My ‘bedside tables’ were literally crafted from two piles of neatly stacked glossy fashion magazines. I wanted to wake up and have that world be the first thing I saw.
The Maria who lived that time in my life wore all sorts of outfits. I never tied myself to one niche. I was gothy one day, a bit more artsy and bohemian the next…
Can you see where this is going yet?
I was expressing myself!
I didn’t care if anyone liked it, I didn’t care if they thought I was crazy for the dreams I had. I wasn’t listening to any outside noise, because I was creating my own mirrors for the person I knew I was, and the life I wanted to live. For the first time in my life, I didn’t need anyone around me to tell me I was cool or likeable - I couldn’t have given a flying fuck if I tried.
With my love for fashion, not only was I expressing myself outwardly in a way that reflected who I knew I was on the inside, I had began to turn it into a career.
I started blogging back in 2012 as I started university and was even shortlisted by Cosmopolitan Magazine for Best New Fashion Blogger that year. I was covering all the fashion week shows from London to Milan, giving my honest opinion on all of them, and blogging my own outfits inbetween. Then Instagram became a thing to market on, and I was being paid for collabs with luxury brands. I was (quite frankly) one of the first OG influencers before it was even a thing.
This period of my life felt like I had achieved so much of that vision I had and I wasn’t even mid 20s yet.
And then, like most good things I've had in my life, I walked away from it. I thought I had outgrown it. I thought I needed to think about my future in a different way. I was always such a walking contradiction; I never once stopped to consider if maybe that was ok and I didn’t have to choose one thing over the other.
Which leads to the next phase of my life.
I finished my studies at university. I was proud of myself. Not only had I completed my dream degree and built up a successful, recognised, fashion blog that made me money, but I was the only person in my group of friends who had actually picked something she loved - and still loved it enough to pursue it as a career by the end. That was the first time I had relentlessly gone after something I wanted, put myself in the right environment for it, and truly thrived as a result.
What happened after was a series of panicked thinking. Of sacrificing certain goals I had (and parts of my identity) in the pursuit of other things in my life.
Upon handing in my final project - a concept store design and visual theory for my fave brand All Saints, I was offered a job at their head office in London. This was an incredibly exciting opportunity and I couldn’t believe that the brand loved my proposal that much to have offered me a job then and there without interview - another reason being in the right environment is key for everything. I knew the connections my university had and I took full advantage of them whilst I was there.
The problem was that I wanted to travel. I knew that if I moved to London and took that job, I would stop at nothing until I worked my way up a ladder, and I wasn’t sure if I would have the opportunity in my life again to just…be free. So I made the difficult choice and picked Sydney, Australia. I applied for a working holiday visa, booked a one way flight whilst drunk in a Newcastle trebles bar one night (because fuck it, why not), and left before my graduation ceremony had even taken place. My mum was fuming.
Now, I’m not going to write my entire life memoir in this article, but what happened afterwards was finding my now husband and choosing to be with him over an exciting London job. His life path wouldn’t have meshed with my goal of being in London - and besides, we had both decided that Australia was where we knew we wanted to be having loved it in Sydney for a year.
Many a time have I sat and thought about how different things might have been if we moved to London and I contacted All Saints again about that job. But what I wonder about more than anything, is what I would have done because of who I was in that environment. I can recognise that since those early years, I have had fewer and fewer external mirrors around me that reflect who I know I am internally.
I worked in jobs I hated, with people who were more narrow minded about things I felt passionate about. I did what was needed to pay rent, or save up for an Australia visa. I focused too much on what life was doing, to stop and consider if any of it truly reflected the me that I always knew I was. That young woman who prioritised things that inspired her, that felt open with so many possibilities - that made her believe she could do and be anything.
It wasn’t until we moved to a country town in Western Australia, 10 years later, that I realised how important it is for my environment to reflect what I know is true about myself internally. It was never a mindset issue for me, I never needed to fix myself so that my ‘dream life’ would appear. I just gradually realised that I stopped expressing myself in the way that made me feel the most alive, and that was leading to such nostalgic feelings overwhelming me that I started questioning everything about my life…
Why did I want to live in Australia? Would I ever consider living anywhere else?
What career path do I really want? Not what pays the bills - just what do I fucking want to do with my day to day?
Do I want my own business, or do I want to work for someone else?
Do I want a quiet life, or is that just an insecurity that’s suffocating my ambition?
When I don’t have anything outside of me reflecting back the fashion, the expansive possibilities of life, the joy, the design, the inspiration, the creativity… I feel myself shrinking. I feel myself feeling less than, because I begin to feel like who I am is wrong. Yep - all because I’m in the wrong place. I start looking at what is around me, and when I realise that I don’t fit into that scenario, I start to cut bits off of myself to make myself fit. The lowest stage of this displacement is when I start trying to make myself more like my environment - that’s when shit really hits the fan and the depression seeps into my soul. It’s like a void I can’t get out of.
But like any woman who knows herself inside out will know, we’re never too far away from coming back to ourselves. The first step is asking ourselves which areas of our life we have control over, and can change first. It doesn’t have to be a whole redesign, but it does have to be impactful. I can’t physically change the town I live in yet. I also don’t have a job that inspires me to wake up in the morning. But there are things I do have, and can change.
For me, that’s building my dream book shelf and adding things I love to it like lego, special editions of my fave books and haunted town house decor from Anthropologie.
It’s taking all the clothes that feel comfy, but meh to look at, and adding safety pins and other pieces that make them 100x edgier and more uniquely me.
It’s looking at my two days per week office job and using it as my own personal runway. Do I care that I live in a country town filled with red dirt? No. Because on a Monday and Wednesday, I’m essentially walking through the front door of Vogue House and trialling out some new fits that I have no business wearing anywhere else.
It’s using my substack as my own magazine and treating it like I’m an editor being paid $200k per year to run.
I’ve started to place some very intentional mirrors around in my external life to match up with who I am on the inside, and where I want to be - not where I currently am.
And that’s what I want you to take from this piece today. I want you to realise that the gap between the life you have now, and the one that feels the most alive and live you, isn’t something you need to go soul searching for. You just need to do some online shopping to kickstart it into gear.
Maria x