i think it’s brave: to not choose a personal brand

no one puts baby in a corner

Casey Lewis

’ substack on gen z has me at attention. on wednesday, she included a link to a guest essay from the ny times about college essays and personal brand. my brain got on the treadmill for a little jog!

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when i applied to college, i filled out 12 applications. almost all of them had sections outside of the common app that required me to write little paragraphs about my favorite place in the world, the last book i read, etc. i distinctly remember going to our town library and sitting outside, typing away, listening to my iPod, not consulting my parents at all.

this is not what i did with my college essay. i consulted my dad over and over as i came up with different topics that i could write about. ultimately, looking back, i picked the wrong one. i wrote about not getting recruited for lacrosse and how that was a challenge in being told no, not feeling good enough, etc. but it probably came off very “poor little suburban white girl.” what i should have submitted, was my junior year english personal essay on my fear of failure. that essay, which i was required to read aloud in front of the entire class, was an inside out look at who i was at that moment in my life. my teacher at the time asked me to stay after class, to let me know that she would not be giving me a grade. i would have to judge for myself how i did, and i would have to live with that, without a letter validating my own perceived efforts. that is another moment from high school that is seared into my brain. i cried tears of relief, she had understood all of me from that one assignment. i should have known that the college admissions departments would’ve seen the same.

all of this is to say, my college essay no longer reflects who i am today! the idea that it would is what makes it such a difficult task. as sarah bernstein says in her piece, humans should not be defining themselves the same way brands do:

In the world of branding, a word that appears again and again is “consistency.” If you are Charmin, that makes sense. People opening a roll of toilet paper do not want to be surprised. If you are a teenage human being, however, that is an unreasonable expectation.

what’s interesting to me is that this idea aligns with the online personas we see popping up every week like the clean girl and cottage-core and coastal grandma. not only is gen z using these trends as a means of defining style, they are also using them to define who they are and what they do. the clean girl aesthetic includes waking up early, wearing no makeup, going to pilates, green juice, meditating. mob wives are confident, loud, wear red lipstick and cheetah print and are generally the opposite of the clean girl. but these trends are constantly shifting and changing, and as someone who isn’t on tiktok, i usually don’t know the new ones until they are basically over.

but when i think about it from a psychological angle, of course these kids are constantly trying to define themselves while also trying to fit in. all of us did this throughout our youth; middle school, high school and college all allowing us the space to learn who we were in the context of our environment and our friends. but mostly, we spent a lot of that time trying to find our niche, the place we felt the most accepted. as a result, we hid or changed some aspects of ourselves to fit the mold.

the idea of personal brand has become even more pervasive because of social media and influencers, as kids launch to stratospheric internet fame and try to maintain it. while some influencers are popular for being zany and all over the place, it doesn’t work for everyone. when building a community, you have to understand what your audience wants. it actually makes me think of the piece that

LSD

wrote about lululemon and the matcha girlies. when you are talking about branding, losing sight of your consumer is lethal. and that’s what followers are, really. they are consumers of an influencer’s content and they buy what that person is selling. also, having a personal brand makes you an easier pitch. you become more marketable to the companies looking to pay you for hawking lip treatments or baggy jeans. from a business perspective, it makes sense! but for teenagers, it doesn’t!!!

i try to think about the personal brand i would’ve given myself in high school. in a way, we were given something slightly adjacent, when teachers submitted words that they felt defined us, which were then read at graduation. i can’t tell you the other words that were read for me, but i can tell you the one that mattered: sparkling. whenever i feel lost, i think about that word. if i feel like i am losing that sparkle, i am probably not be in the right place. now i know it’s not going to be how i feel all of the time, but it can be a common thread.

high schoolers all have generally similar makeups (stereotypes exist for a reason people), so most of the unique things about them are small, maybe things they don’t even share outside of their own family. and therefore, those small things don’t necessarily come to mind when defining themselves! when you are asking someone to box themselves in, those small but important things tend to get lost. but when you think about trying to stand out among thousands of kids, it’s probably not your good grades or your soccer skills that are going to really do it.

there are so many other ways to get to the heart of who someone is. most of the time, it’s through how they experience the world around them. how their brain works, what draws their attention, what they value, who they look for in a crowded room, where they go when they are sad. but unfortunately, as sarah writes, the college application system cannot accommodate that. so for now, this is the way.

though i do not tutor students on this, my new take is that when defining yourself at any stage, think about how you feel at your best. what are you doing? what words come to mind? who is around? where are you? that’s going to change, obviously, as you grow and move through the world. but the feeling! that will always be there! and that’s so much less pressure.

cheers to being brave enough to live outside of a box. to defying the definitions that follow you. to making changes at any age, whenever you feel something isn’t right. when i look at my world, and the people in it, i didn’t expect it would look like this. but i am so happy i listened to my gut, to that missing sparkle. it was the hardest and bravest thing i have ever done, and it is also the best.

xo

meigs

a few pins from this week that i loved: