Personal Style walks hand in hand with Self-Esteem.

Personal style is a journey, so is self-esteem. I truly believe one cannot evolve without the other. For me it is the same as the existential question of who came first, the chicken or the egg?

Nobody likes having low self-esteem, one of the most important decisions I made in my life was “I don’t want to feel like this anymore!”. This decision eventually led me to therapy, eventually led me to martial arts, etc, etc.

The most important thing I want to say is that there is no perfect path to improve self-esteem. All of us are different individuals, with different life experiences, therefore the work we need to do will be different. For me, my turning points were therapy and Taekwondo. 

I was always an eccentric kid, I always felt I didn’t fit in. I felt like a boy and a girl, information I am still processing until today. 

But the more I worked on myself, the more I loved myself, the more I believed in myself, the more my personal style was more honest and truthful, reflecting my personality. And the more honest I was to myself, the more I explored my fashion sense, the more confident I felt. One thing was feeding the other. 

You can wear the most expensive dress in the world, if you don’t believe in your own worth, that dress will not work on you.  You have to believe it, because if you don’t believe in yourself, who will?

In the past, if I was wearing something different but I didn’t feel confident, some person would make a comment and this would bring me down. What I have learned with life is that I deserve my space. I learned to talk back “So what? I am wearing this and you have an opinion, so what?”.

A huge life lesson I learned from Feminism, from therapy, from Taekwondo, is to Take Space. Take your space, you deserve it, it is yours if you want it. You may not want to make a big statement, you may even want to stay quiet, but you are there, in that space that now it’s yours and no one can remove you from it. 

Personal style is about holding your space, your spot. And if anyone challenges that, your reaction needs to be “So what?”.

My question to you is, do you want to take your space?

I am Franca and this is personal.