You are your new favourite influencer

Being yourself is about to trend.

Influencer culture as we have known it is over. We’re in the middle of a significant shift in who we deem to be influential and what we define as aspirational.

Deep breath in and… exhale.

Whether we're conscious of it or not, we’ve been squashing what makes us unique, interesting and special since about 2010 when street style photographers started photographing fashion bloggers outside the shows. This, in my eyes, is what gave birth to The Influencer.

That’s 15 long years many of us have spent trying to embody the current ideal.

An ideal is a standard of perfection, beauty or excellence and that’s been our intrinsic motivator as a collective of consumers — to meet the standard. And most of the time, at any cost.

And goodness me have we have paid.

We’ve paid with our money. We’ve paid with our integrity. We’ve paid with our values. We’ve paid with emotional labour and obsessive thinking. And then there’s the shame.

Oh, the shame.

It’s been 15 years of feeling deep shame about what we don’t have and what we don’t look like. A decade-and-a-half of ~manifesting~ what we need to achieve and acquire and by when, in order to meet the standard for what’s been deemed valuable, desirable and on-trend.

We’ve found it difficult to really, truly care about anything but ourselves because becoming someone we’re not is a full-time job. It’s required so much more dedication and perseverance than I think we’ll ever be able to fully comprehend.

But it’s over now.

Another deep breath in and… exhale.

The nightmare that had us walking around as clones of our favourite influencer or celebrity (same thing?) is over and the new era of influence is here.

And want to know the great, very nourishing news? It’s deeply connected to a part of us I’m very passionate about excavating: our True Self.

hello :)

This new era of influence is a very warm invitation to turn our gaze away from people who package and sell their privilege (I have participated in this at times) and instead, get low and listen to ourselves.

To me, the quality of now feels like an almost primal call to return home after being away in a very distant, very perfect, pouty and curated land where everyone looks the same, sounds the same, acts the same, dresses the same and furnishes their home the same.

It’s actually kind of crazy that instead of opening us up to a more diverse worldview that develops our individual taste and deepens our natural interests, access to the lives of people outside of our direct community has done the opposite. It’s flattened our taste and homogenised our interests.

And we’re done with it. I actually think we’re kind of cringing at ourselves now and wondering how we got here. I mean we know, but it's still shocking to bear witness to all the ways we’ve buried our authentic expression — whether that’s beauty, fashion, home, work, creativity, lifestyle or within our friendships.

Where is that interesting, interested, confident, curious and experimental woman we used to know?

It’s officially time to retrieve her.

My prediction is the new cohort of influencers will be made up of those proactively pursuing their niche interests and claiming their quirks. We’ll follow the people who have allowed what makes them different to rise to the surface of how they present themselves to the world but we won’t want to copy them.

This new era of influence won’t be about emulation, it’ll be about examples.

We’ll see influencers and creators as examples of what showing up online and offline as your True Self looks like and sound like.

Having the most followers won’t be desirable because that’ll be an indication of palatability and being palatable will not be the vibe. We're breaking free from living a neutral-coloured existence that has no signs of life.

There’s of course a macroeconomic shift that is informing all of this but my view is the moment buying (dupes and copies, mostly) took over developing as a throughway to embodying the current ideal was the moment the influencer era we’ve all been enduring, died.

It’s the same for beauty and body as it is for fashion. Now that you can buy skinny and buy young, anyone can have and be both which means these things are no longer desirable and desire is what upholds the current ideal and the current ideal is what drives status and status is what maintains influence.

To note: Medications like Mounjaro and Ozempic and muscle relaxants like Botox are essential to the health and wellbeing of many people. For those many people, it isn’t about vanity or embodying the current ideal, it’s about prolonging their life or making their day-to-day existence less painful. This we acknowledge and respect.

You see?

We only desire what we aren’t, can’t have or can’t buy. If most of us can buy our way in then we’re no longer desiring it because we’ve got it. We are now what we once admired which means it’s no longer desirable. And this means it’s no longer the intrinsic motivator behind all of our action in life.

We used to spend a decade tending to the health of our skin or slowly investing in good quality pieces to build out a wardrobe we're proud of but now we can literally “get the look” today, and so we do.

Or I should say, we did. Because I really don’t think we will anymore.

It’s just not fulfilling and this is why the current culture of influence was always going to have an expiry date. We are purpose-built beings in search of meaning and a sense of inner fulfillment and now we’ve realised that becoming a carbon copy of an influencer isn’t giving us those things. Instead, what we’ve acquired for ourselves is a flat, constricted, one dimensional existence that never feels like home. One that requires us to try to be someone we’re not every single day.

It's exhausting. We're exhausted.

When I was first out with the message of making contact with our True Self in 2018, it felt more like a plea. Seven years later and it’s a collective truth. We know this is the throughway to the peace we're all desiring. We know we thought the bag, the shoes, the lips, the job and the body would heal the wound weeping within us but in getting that stuff — or some of it at least — we realised it only inflamed what already felt sore.

Why? Because conforming to the current ideal is the wrong medicine. The real remedy is being our True Self — something that is ever unfolding and evolving. In its purest form, it has no label. No niche. No boundary lines or cute bio.

Moving forward, our essence is the muse. We are now our favourite influencer.

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And while I believe we’re awake to this shift, I can also see we haven’t quite figured out the action to take on the other side. It’s kind of like entering a void. If it’s not all of this, then what is it? What am I supposed to want? What am I supposed to wear? What is the purpose of life if not to be skinny, eternally young, rich, known and on-trend?

In short: it’s you.

It’s you realising yourself in your specialness. It’s you existing as an expression of your uniqueness. It’s you letting the parts of you out that you’ve so far been suppressing because the fashion, beauty and life overlords deemed them to be wrong or weird or undesirable in some way. It’s you wanting different stuff and outcomes to other people because the storylines you’re here to play out in the stage show that is your life are different to theirs.

I feel like I’m halfway there so I may as well just take us all the way.

The actual purpose of life is to realise yourself as one unique expression of the one whole thing (Big Self) and then use the distance you now have between that eternal truth and your physical body (Small Self) to have a good time, if you can.

To be useful. To contribute what only you can through the prism of your own personal power. To live into your version of A Little, Rich Life.

This is what I believe is about to trend and it’s free. It doesn’t cost any money to show up as us but in the early days of revealing ourselves to ourselves, I think we do pay in time. Well this was true for me at least.

It takes time to remember our personal taste and preferences. It takes time and a lot of deep thinking to develop our own sense of style. It takes time to build up the courage required to set boundaries with the people or the ideals that no longer align to the evolution of our values and how we want to feel in our life. Also, how we want to feel about our life.

It takes time to re-learn what we feel good wearing and what belief about beauty we’re funding and reinforcing every time we look in the mirror.

It’s like we have to go on a journey of remembering because our current culture of influence has caused us to believe we don’t have individual interests or interesting taste.

This is kind of hilarious when you think about it. We have literally been hand-crafted by Consciousness itself and it imbibed in all of us these sophisticated qualities, cool quirks and unique gifts so that we could (*it could*) have a special time down here at Earth School while also getting some meaningful stuff done in the name of progressing the literal Universe forward and here’s our cute, little mind believing we need to fit the current ideal to belong.

We were born belonging. The body we are currently inhabiting is just Consciousness stretching itself somewhere new. We have never been separate. We are never actually alone.

They really don’t want us to know this. Liberated people are dangerous to a system that relies on blind conformity.

I know for me, the journey back home to my True Self was and still is about doing less. Trying less. Caring less about my looks and instead allowing the fullness of Nature’s design to reveal itself. Some days this feels effortless. Some days I want to get Botox again and perhaps also one of those natural-looking boob jobs everyone seems to be getting. (I had low milk supply when I had Betty which meant I fed mostly from my right breast — Power Boob — and now it sits significantly lower than my left which bugs me even though I recognise my body is magical and the source of life itself.)

Practically it’s looked like unfollowing and muting. Creating the space I need to simply be. Moving away from obsessive self interrogation and being in constant conversation about my life / my (pretty tiny in the scheme of things) traumas. Reading more books. Gallery strolls over Instagram scrolls. Creating mood boards for me vs. the grid. Spending time with art and poetry I don't immediately understand and allowing the discomfort that comes with not knowing. Listening to music that isn’t trending. Watching documentaries. Holding firmer boundaries. Joining like-minded communities. Returning to thrifting as a throughway to re-inhabiting my personal style and honing my personal taste — two things I buried when I started working in women’s lifestyle media in 2011.

All of this reads much more simplistically than what experiencing it has felt like but in short, when I released the valve — the current ideal — my individual flow of consciousness could move where it wanted to go and a more honest, connected and content version of me emerged.

The beautiful thing about the quality of the time we’re now living in is I don’t have to wish this for you, too, because it’s already happening. Maybe now you’ll just be a little bit more aware of it and hopefully use that awareness to take the kind of action that points you back in the direction of beautiful, essential, unique, quirky and cool you.

It’s never been more “in” to be yourself and anyone that continues to curate or contort themselves will find themselves without an audience.

What’s coming up for you? Any builds or reflections to share?

Alison xo

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