this one has been perculating for a while ... this musing on what my personal style is and how it developed and what it really is in practice. i feel like if i had to put a name to it, i might call it ... "effortless goth" ... and only goth in the sense that there is darkness because brooding on reality necessarily curates a kind of darkness.

and not necessarily a sombre darkness. no. for me, this darkness is soothing, healing, ... warm. aesthetically, i choose comfortable and black everytime, everywhere ... relieved only by one or more of the colours from the ethiopian royal standard of haile selassie when absolutely necessary. which is ... odd ... and i'll tell you why...

growing up, my father especially, drilled into me just how much he thought of blackness as substandard; that blackness is to be fought against and overcome. he did this in many ways, both explicitly (for example, telling me how bob marley is unsavory and untalented) and implicitly (for example, insisting on playing music like handel's messiah and the student prince on every christmas and easter holiday).

my maternal grandmother made sure to reinforce these values by telling me 'yuh nose too big' or 'pull in yuh lip mek mi pass' ... revering dad as some kind of saviour and degrading mom and i every chance she got. btw: i should note here that my father is very light skinned with wavy hair (it's the taino in him). i note this because the antiblackness becomes clearer when you realise this.

i grew up with very few jamaican themes in my everyday life. rastafarians were dirty and misguided but mario lanza had 'a beautiful tenor sound'; marcus garvey's 'back to africa' was near-sighted and misguided; norman manley and his son michael manley were jamaica's saviours while edward seaga was the beginning of our downfall and pearnel charles was just ridiculously mediocre.

so that i grew up to subconsciously embrace the very colours that represent his disdain is ironic...

as a child, my mother dressed me in pink with white lace dresses and socks and black patent leather shoes and dad would take photos of me in the garden in my finery after sunday morning church service. when i hit puberty, and wanted to join my peers in torn-knee, stone-washed jeans, she was having none of it. she fought me for years on a pair of grey and blue nike shoes i wore to school in defiance of school dress policy. and when i finally hit the work world, she made me make my work clothes conformant, bolstered by more dress code policies and cash incentives (it was cheaper to make workplace uniforms than to invest in professional clothing).

she did not, however, have control over how i spent my own money on my off-duty clothes. and thus started a slow and steady move from white supremacist styling to something very uniquely mine. wearing black in a tropical climate is, at best, ill-advised. it does tend to draw in and hold heat. which is great here in the temperate lands. so whilst i still lived in jamaica, my style was centred around comfort and ease. i threw away my heels and stuffy dresses that stifled me and bought into more and more wedge and inch-high heels with pants and loose fitting blouses and shirts... and ... i grew out my chemically straightened hair into locs...

funny story: i was effectivley fired from my first job because the acting managing director was unhappy with my refusal to wear skirts, high heels, and makeup. #tangent

migrating to the u.s. opened up the possibilty that i could go even more radical with my choice in clothes. and for many years, the choice of black was almost unconscious. it wasn't until about 2014 that i was finally beginning to be aware of how i was choosing my clothes. and it was 2020 when i finally chose to actively seek out the somewhat traditional goth aesthetic ... mesh, ribbons, lace, matte black jewelry and makeup. tho, the makeup is limited to very specific situations like fancy dress balls and such ...

i don't think i am a typical goth. i am my own goth, heavily influenced by the history my upbringing tried to erase. i don't think it's a coincidence that i am coming into my own in the very year that my mother died. in a lot of ways, her death released me from a lot of the guilt i carried at abandoning what she taught me... who she wanted me to be... it emancipated me from mental slavery ...

it's all of 54 years after my birth, but ... i guess it's never too late to find yourself.