Finding My Personal Style—and Myself Along the Way

I’ve enjoyed playing with fashion for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest—and fondest—memories are of playing dress-up with friends and going back-to-school shopping with my mom.

Every September felt like an early arrival of Christmas, only better because I got to spend the day with my mom picking out everything for the new school year.

As soon as we got home, I’d run to my room and try everything on all over again—this time carefully planning an outfit for each day of the first week of school.

Fashion has always been something I’ve loved, but my relationship with my own personal style has been a little more complicated.

In a way, I’ve had to go on a lot of dates with myself. Marrying my identity with my personal style has been a relationship that has taken years to understand, shape, and embrace.

My curiosity about clothes really started around eight or nine, when playing dress-up became one of my favorite pastimes. By ten, I was beginning to experiment more intentionally with what I wore.

And from that ten-year-old version of me, it took nearly two decades to finally feel confident in my style.

Along the way, I experimented with plenty of colors, trends, and aesthetics. For a while, my style leaned tomboyish. Then it became eclectic and vibrant. Later, I gravitated toward something more bohemian before swinging in the opposite direction toward minimal and tailored.

Today, I’ve landed somewhere in between.

And maybe that’s why it finally feels like me.

My style doesn’t fit neatly into one category because neither do I. Instead, it reflects the different influences, experiences, and identities that have shaped me.

The Influence of Growing Up Between Cultures

Growing up, my identity was always connected to multiple cultures.

I was raised in a Mexican-American household where Spanish and English existed alongside one another. Spanish was the language I primarily spoke as a young child, and even throughout grade school, I attended multilingual classes with multilingual teachers.

That multicultural upbringing shaped how I saw myself—and eventually, how I wanted to express myself through fashion.

For a long time, though, I struggled to find the balance.

I wanted my style to reflect pieces of my Mexican-American upbringing and my creativity while also representing the ambitious, career-driven woman I was becoming.

At different points in my life, I leaned heavily into one side or another. My style became more bohemian when I wanted to express my creative side. Later, I moved toward something much more minimal, structured, and tailored.

Neither felt completely right.

Eventually, I realized I didn’t have to choose.

I could appreciate color, texture, prints, and expressive details while still loving a beautifully tailored trouser, structured blazer, or simple neutral outfit.

The sweet spot was somewhere in between.

Feminine Meets Tomboy

I also grew up surrounded by boys.

Most of my cousins were boys, and while my parents were at work, my nanny also cared for two boys in our neighborhood. So while my sister was my first friend, I spent much of my childhood—from the time I was a baby until I was about thirteen—around boys who influenced everything from the movies I liked to my interest in technology and, eventually, my clothes.

I remember listening to them talk about the latest sneakers, Nike Air Jordans, and artist collaborations.

One of my earliest back-to-school fashion memories is getting a pair of Skechers sneakers. It was the early 2000s, they were very on-trend, and my childhood best friend had the same pair. I remember being so excited to wear them on the first day of school.

Looking back, I’m grateful for those influences.

They made me comfortable experimenting with clothes outside of what might have traditionally been considered feminine for girls my age. That curiosity has stayed with me.

Today, I love a beautifully tailored trouser just as much with a heel as I do with a sneaker. I’ll pair a floral dress with sneakers without thinking twice.

One doesn’t make me feel more feminine than the other.

They’re simply different expressions of the same person.

Comfort Became Part of My Style

Perhaps the biggest evolution in my personal style has had less to do with clothes and more to do with how I feel wearing them.

Being comfortable and confident in my own skin might be the boldest—and best—accessory I’ve learned to wear. It’s also the one that took me the longest to find.

Like the perfect-fitting pair of jeans, confidence has been something I’ve had to search for.

I haven’t found it completely. I’m not sure any of us ever do. But I’m much closer than I was 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

There was a time when I didn’t feel comfortable wearing jeans because I was so critical of how they looked on my body. Skirts were easier, but even then, I often avoided clothes that showed too much of my legs because I simply didn’t feel comfortable in them.

Over time, I started experimenting instead of criticizing.

I tried different rises, cuts, lengths, and silhouettes until I began to understand something that seems so obvious to me now: clothes are supposed to fit me. I’m not supposed to change myself to fit the clothes.

Even today, my preferences continue to evolve. Lately, I’ve found myself gravitating toward shorts with a slightly longer inseam—not quite knee-length, but longer than a traditional cutoff. It’s a small shift, but it represents something much bigger about the way I approach getting dressed now.

I pay attention to what makes me feel good rather than what I think I’m supposed to wear.

Style That Feels Like Me

It might sound cliché to say that finding my personal style helped me find myself, but I think there’s some truth in it.

My relationship with fashion has gone through nearly as many twists, experiments, and reinventions as I have.

And maybe that’s the point.

I no longer think personal style is about finally arriving at one perfectly defined aesthetic and staying there forever. It’s about getting dressed in a way that reflects who you are right now—while leaving enough room for the person you’re still becoming.

When I look in the mirror today, I see pieces of all the versions of myself that came before me: the little girl planning her first-week-of-school outfits, the tomboy in sneakers, the creative experimenting with bohemian pieces, and the career woman who fell in love with tailored trousers and blazers.

They’re all still there.

And the woman looking back at me now feels creative, feminine, bold, ambitious, and increasingly comfortable in her own skin.

For the first time, I don’t feel like I have to choose between those versions of myself.

I can simply get dressed as all of them.

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