Self in Motion
Preference, Identity and the jumbled up mess it creates.
Witnessing your tastes change is a striking thing to experience. New patterns of behavior emerge seemingly out of nowhere. What was once a relentless preference you forced down the throats of everyone in your orbit with stubborn persistence is now a passing thought. After years of developing the taste for attention-grabbing, vibrantly colored and patterned clothing, ferociously amassing such pieces and curating a sizable collection of loud ensembles, today, I no longer enjoy the same untethered vibrancy in my closet. My threshold for color has lowered, making room only for a handful of punchy hues tucked into a wardrobe now grounded in tempered neutral and earth tones. It's not that I don’t enjoy color anymore. I just enjoy it in moderation. Small bursts of bold a tie dye graphic tee, a playful pair of socks, a fun patterned messenger bag. So, a style identity that was once married to bright and copious color is now defined by restraint, shaped by sensibility rather than spectacle.
Sometimes we get humbled by the intensity of our own preferences. We cling to them so tightly and wear them so loudly that we forget that preferences are fleeting by nature. They change in unpredictable ways. They are seasons, shifting cycles of behavior year after year. The same as the being wearing the clothes themselves. This fierce grip on preference is no fault of our own, but rather the deeply human desire for external markers of identity. The pair of Gymshark shorts that make you feel like a real powerlifter, the selvedge denim you only switched to so you could maintain the acceptance of the fashion bros, or the fixation on getting that one haircut as if it’s the last link to your manhood. My once loyal connection to vibrant color was without question egged on by the influences of queer visibility culture, having just come into my own as a lesbian at the time the color obsession started to bloom.
It all feeds the same hunger for belonging, not because every preference is a performance but because the desire to be seen can so quickly turn expression into strategy and cause us to forget what was chosen and what was constructed.
That’s where the tension lies. Our identities may be shaped around these preferences, but they’re not built on them. They’re merely accented by the things we wear or consume—not defined by them. The real structure of identity lives in the values and behaviors that endure beyond the reach of external validation. The parts of us that remain when no one else is watching.
The tell tale sign of the impermanence of my style preference was the intention behind my colorful wardrobe. Every decision I made about my outfit was guided by this thought process: “hmmm what would get me the most recognition today?” And the worst part of it all was my success rate. The blinding pair of pants and matching hat I put on DID get me the compliments I was seeking. This granted me a false sense of self-understanding while quietly eroding my sense of self-trust. And it’s trust, trust in our own instincts, that allows us the fluidity to shift with our changing tastes and to re-evaluate what we think we know about ourselves.
This isn’t a claim that absolves us from (overwhelming) insecurity. We can never know ourselves in any absolute sense, but this willingness to re-evaluate and remain not just open but curious about what might be on our evolving horizons is a defining difference between those who adopt a productive acceptance of others, communities unfamiliar, values once foreign, and extend hands of recognition, and those who exercise resistance and exclusion practically on instinct to perspectives that challenge their rigid confines of projected self. This mechanism of curiosity is what distinguishes principle from preference, and evolution from ego, what separates the rooted self from the performed one.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enjoy the treats—the cool necklace that reminds you of the one you saw on that older queer kid who made confidence look easy, or the pants you couldn’t stop thinking about after seeing them on someone who felt like the version of yourself you were trying to become. But I think there’s some utility in enjoying them with the lightness they deserve, without handcuffing them to identity. Because the self is always in motion, and we owe it the freedom to move as it moves.