Flipping through the pages of the Young Hollywood issue of Teen Vogue as the carpet presses patterns into the backs of my arms, I study. I have a brief from my mom and I’m gathering data.
“Decide how you want to decorate your new room. For your 13th birthday we can do whatever you want…even paint it.”
Even though I know this is an attempt to quiet the guilt she feels for ripping me from my friends and community and best ever ballet studio, again, to pursue a job in Austin… I’m excited.
I flip to “9 tips to revamp your room” and find the perfect purple and black room. It’s so French! It’s so Audrey!
So, we picked the purple paint and wrought iron shelves, a new white printed bedspread set from Bed, Bath, and Beyond with one of the 20% off coupons my mom hoards. And after a full Saturday of redecorating, that room became my whole universe. So many lessons were learned within those not lavender, not periwinkle, not violet, just purple walls.
“The girl sat at the table looking like a bored model.” One sentence and I’m practicing a pouty-lip resting face any time I catch my own reflection in the mirror hanging on my wall.
“She was the type who spoke so infrequently, that when she did everyone listened.” I yearned to be a quiet, mysterious girl that only spoke in profound additions. I tried for a whole week.
This is the room where I watched every Audrey Hepburn movie and willed Breakfast at Tiffany’s to be my favorite film. Because it was Blair Waldorf’s favorite film.
(It was also this room where I watched Stick It on repeat and didn’t quite understand my fixation with the ice bath scene but that is for another essay.)
After hours of research, I built a manual for myself that echoed inside my head.
Swallow the tears. You’re a teenager now.
Don’t say what you think, just say something funny.
Fix your hair, it needs to be undone but not messy.
You’re caring too much, you’re laughing too much,
You’re too much.
Be cool.
The pursuit of this shape-shifting concept consumed so much of my time in that room. A desire to belong beat alongside every pulse of my heart. Yet, I found myself having to constantly learn a new set of rules. The ever-evolving cultural hierarchy of cool and not cool.
Christina, who was aptly named, got all the solos in choir and loved Sara Bareilles so I blasted the Little Voice album on repeat. Bailey wore Nike running shorts and big T-shirts (also randomly extremely popular because she was a barrel racer… this was Texas y’all) so I begged my mom for $45 shorts.
By meticulously observing my surroundings, the way a word I wasn’t allowed to say was used for emphasis or the most frequent width of a tank top strap, I didn’t have to risk making any decisions for myself. I didn’t have to do the messy, inconvenient work of having my own back. That whole trusting myself thing.
Cool is so convincing. It convinced me that what I liked wasn’t worthy of sharing. What I liked wasn’t worthy. I wasn’t worthy. I let it dictate my every decision – what to wear, where to eat, who to invest in as a friend. Self-conscious to the point of unrecognizable. Which choices were me and which were influenced, contrived, contorted based on the cool of the moment?
Cool is slippery. Even now I want to turn away from it and talk instead about the trials of girlhood, of navigating class differences, of being an eldest sibling, of moving to a new place, of capitalism and how it consumes us, of anything other than this nebulous thing we see as a net positive.
To be clear, I am not advocating against personal taste, or shared appreciation of beauty, brilliance, innovation. In fact, championing the brilliance of others is kind of my whole thing. What is tyrannical about Cool is that in the pursuit of it I failed to value my own preferences and therefore failed to value myself. I felt (and sometimes still feel) controlled by expectations I did not create.
As I grew and untangled the hurt that kept me from expressing, I slowly began to build my own taste. To let it be okay to like things that other people don’t, and also to like things that everyone does. The fear of being called “basic” still creeps up on me, as if similarity is a slur.
I asked myself why I felt changed after studying the psychology of personality in college? What about that Georgia O’Keeffe painting resonated? Why was I playing that Wild Reeds song on repeat? (Spoiler alert: I was going through a break-up!) Researching Frida Khalo and June Jordan? Reading everything adrienne maree brown has ever written? What did I admire most about the people in my life? About the people I follow on the internet? About my favorite artists? And of course, an all time greatest hit in my brain:
What if I lived my life based on how it feels instead of how it appears?
What feels good? And isn’t that the coolest thing I can do?
Cool is inevitable. I will always call my sisters asking “is this cool or weird?” What I’m really asking is “Is this me? Does it fit my taste?” And the answer is ever evolving. Of course I am shaped by everything I interact with, and I get to choose how I interact with it. So, I’m embracing the cringe of being a creative human with original thoughts. I’m deciding that no one person is the arbiter of cool and at the same time we all decide what is cool at every moment.
I’m wondering if maybe it doesn’t have to be so hard. My litmus test has become one simple question: “Did I feel like myself during that?” Maybe, we decide to wield cool with a mercy and a kindness. Most often now I find myself admiring those that choose to diverge and do what feels best to them. You’re super into foreign horror films? heavy metal? ultra marathons? How utterly cool! I love that for you!
Despite the reclaiming of Cool, I still see the signs of friends who are haunted by ghosts of “please like me!” past. It is a life-long unlearning. The wide eyes after a misinterpreted giggle, “What?! Is this silly? Am I silly?”
To which I reply, “No, it’s so cool!”
I resonated with so much of this! I love the idea of constantly defining your own taste (and the ice bath scene in stick it lmao)
2 questions, give me your definition of "cool".
and, how do you determine to invest in an individual as a "friend", what are the deterministic values?