Toe Rings

Learning to Be Myself, Among Other Things

A little over a year ago, I had returned from my semester abroad in Rome completely exhausted, completely broke, and completely at a loss for words to describe the experience. I spent my days scrapbooking the thousands of photos and writing countless journal entries. Christmas and New Years came and went, and it was about time for me to head back to school in San Diego. It was right about that time that my mom sat my sister and me down to go through her old jewelry. It was all beautiful, but in the spirit of being totally honest, I only wear one of the dozens of pieces that I took from her to this day: my toe ring. It's a real gold ring that was too small for my fingers, so she suggested I put it on my toe. Brilliant!

I thought to myself, Okay, this works. Cool girls have toe rings. People who see it will think I am cool. So I put it on, and I never thought about it again. My life was never incomplete for not having a toe ring to wear, and my life certainly did not feel complete once I had one. The key here was that I had built a whole personality type in my mind for the people who did have a toe ring. These were the cool girls who were unbothered by things and wore minimalist clothes but somehow had all the perfect accessories and listened to new music and walked about the world in this sort of effortless way. In my mind, these were the girls who had toe rings. So I put it on the one time, and then I did not give it much thought after that unless someone else brought it up.

This is a pattern I have recognized in myself. I have this tendency to see something that is "cool" and think that it is magically going to make my life better. I have no idea what I am doing or how to be on the right track 95% of the time, so it is always easier to look to what someone I am inspired by is doing. That girl who always knows the right answer in my ethics class? Maybe if I dress like her, I will feel more sure of myself when I try to answer. The girl who is somehow best friends with my boss at my internship? Maybe if I start listening to the podcast they are always talking about, I will have something to contribute to the next conversation. The girl in my sorority who always has the "perfectly curated" Instagram post? Maybe if I download some new app that makes my pictures look like they were taken on a film camera because I can't actually afford a film camera, I can measure up. And on, and on, and on.

I don't know if you all have seen New Girl, but there's a scene I think about a lot. The show centers around Jess Day, this whimsical woman living in a new city with her roommates who happen to be these three silly guys. Schmidt, one of her roommates who is this high-powered business-y goofball turns to her and says, "You just walk around all day thinking about other people's feelings?" to which Jess responds "Yeah, don't you?" and Schmidt looks at her incredulously to say "No. How do you get anything done?" and Jess admits, "It's hard." It's so hard. Big time. There is so much to consider all of the time. Doing our best often means taking into consideration how everyone will feel and every little thing that could go wrong. It just feels like so much pressure. Sometimes I look at my to-do list and think, Wow, okay. I am a 22 year old girl. I am trying my best, and I am figuring it out.

I think this is why people turn to influencers. It is so much easier to look at these shiny people on the screen who seem to have it all together than to try and come to terms with my own shortcomings. Whether they are spending time on these gorgeous island vacations or applying some new skincare product to an acne-free face, it just feels so much easier to see the world through their rose-colored glasses. Mixed in between the horrible headlines of today's world that pop up on my Instagram feed, things can't be so bad because there is another lip-liner to try! Ladies and gentlemen, I don't even know how to use lip-liner. I'm exaggerating a little, of course, but maybe you see the point I am driving at here: we will all go to these great lengths to seem cool, and when that fails, we distract ourselves by investing all of this time and energy into these lives that aren't even ours.

Blog, may I be so real for a second? I am so over it. The curated feeds and the trendy products and the mindless scrolling. I hate it with every fiber of my being. This is possibly a hot take, I'm not super sure. That's part of why I write these blog posts. I am no influencer. I am no lifestyle guru. These blog posts are a shout in the void for me. And if I am lucky enough, one person will read it and think to themselves, Okay, she gets me. What a profound and tremendous honor that is! And maybe you disagree with me! That is lovely too. Really lovely, in fact.

Over this winter break, I have been challenging myself to be more critical of my screen time. This has been tricky for me. I am someone who is hard on myself by nature, so really the last thing I need is to be judging myself on this time that is meant to be turning my brain off and relaxing for a bit. But that's the catch it seems! I'm not actually relaxing. Instead, my poor little brain is being bombarded by content which promotes these impossible beauty standards. I am not meant to look airbrushed. I am a real person who probably needs to pluck her eyebrows and is usually due for a waxing appointment, but that doesn't mean I can't throw on a sweet little sundress that I collected during my travels and brush my hair to look beautiful for the day in a way that is real. I find my friends to be exponentially more beautiful than any model I have ever seen on my Instagram because they are real. Their eyes look the most beautiful in the sunset and when they laugh, it seems like the whole world laughs too. Wow that seems cheesy, but I have found that even the cheesiest quotes have some truth to them. When it comes down to it, I am going to believe my friends are more beautiful than the ads every single time.

So then where does this pressure to be perfect come from? I would never say the things to my friends that I say to myself. I would never want them to put in all of this effort into feeling cool just to end up feeling empty. To use my time spent scrolling as a sort of palliative for human existence. To somehow curate myself in a way that is the most digestible to others. To make them like me. To get my point across in a way that is aesthetic and effortless and cool. To wear a freaking toe ring. It all feels so ridiculous when you look at it this way. It is not this deep. This pressure I feel which sometimes seems to be physically weighing on my chest was never meant to be there in the first place.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I want to get off my phone. But it's ironic because this blog post was inspired by videos that I found while scrolling on my phone. And isn't this the double edged sword of social media? We are the most digitally connected generation in history, and we are also the ones with the highest reports of loneliness. How can this be? Truth be told, I have no idea. I have this feeling that a solution requires a deep understanding of human psychology which is one of the things which draws me to the field the most. It's funny, I didn't even know what psychology was ten years ago. It wasn't even on my radar. I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write stories that helped people to feel less alone.

So maybe this is why I have this blog, after all. I saw this TikTok the other day which ironically made me delete the whole app. Ironic, I know. Anyways, it's this girl with a fun and colorful scarf who starts her video by saying "I'm only going to say this once because you only need to hear it once." And she proceeds to urge the viewer to get off their phone. "The more you sit there and let that energy just fester, the more it turns into anger and resentment. Okay, return to your whimsy. It is still there inside you. If you used to be smart, you're still smart. If you used to be creative, you're still creative. All the things that make you who you are, that you love about yourself, that you look back on with nostalgia, are actually stronger now. They're just dormant. Okay? So wake up and lock in." And I don't know about you, but I really needed to hear that. I am still creative. Little Gracie who desperately wanted to be an author still lives inside me. Even when I decided to start growing up and seeking career paths and internships that the people I looked up to deemed to be "practical," the urge to share my heart still lives inside of me.

This video set me off in search of others who feel the same way. I stumbled across several gems. I first found Mickey Galvin's video essay stop trying to be cool girl which I recommend to anyone who has a spare couple of minutes to watch! And then I started listening to an episode from Emma Chamberlain's podcast Anything Goes called are you living for you? which is also absolutely brilliant. And then I finished off this late night listening session with Lexi Hidalgo's How to break the endless loop of negative thoughts which is also just lovely and wonderful. All of them discuss how important it is to just stop being so obsessed with your own image. We were never designed to look in the mirror this much or to be so aware of how we appear on social media. This led me to one very important question: how much do I do just because everyone else is doing it?

Answer: a lot. When I was in sixth grade, many of my teachers shared this concern, and so we all had an essay assignment to report back on lemmings. Lemmings are these small rodents who are characterized in movies as these little animals who blindly follow the leader. The little guys in Zootopia who blindly buy the popsicles everyday? Those are lemmings. In the beginning of my middle school experience, the adults who loved us the most were worried we were falling into similar patterns. It seemed completely uncalled for that the time, but now I wonder how much of what I do is similar to the way the lemming behaves? For example, I don't know that I ever really wanted to be on Instagram, everyone else was on it. The same goes for VCSO and TikTok and Snapchat. I think I was just fine without them. I had my Temple Run and my American Girl games and I was reading a book a week at my sister's gymnastics practice and I loved it.

And then I finally got social media in eighth grade and all of the sudden it was all about who was following who and whose posts got a lot of likes and which girls were getting which comments from which boys. And we were what? Twelve? I had the whole rest of my life to be self conscious, but there was such a fear of missing out at twelve that I got roped into this cycle which has continued now for a whole decade. Well I am over it!

I love nothing more than when people post things with no regard for how it will be received or people who wear the zaniest outfits with no concern about how they will be perceived. I love when people laugh so loud in public places that everyone turns around to see what is going on. I love when people make an absolute fool of themselves on the dance floor. The beauty in growing older and evolving and changing is that the more experiences you have, the more you can feel confident in your ability to think for yourself. It is so lovely to be able to live in a way that is authentically you. Real life is often messy and does not fit into a perfectly curated photo dump, but it's so, so good.

Many of the friends I have now are the most nerdy, loud, awkward, and hilarious people I have ever met. I can be sobbing publicly on campus, and they will be there to make me feel better in seconds. More than anything, they make me feel safe to be myself. They are my home away from home, and I consider them to be my second family. They have shown me that I don't have to be this perfectly curated Gracie all the time. I can listen to my theater kid playlist in the shower and eat only pasta for days on end and never actually end up telling the joke because I'm laughing too hard and lay down on the lawn in the middle of campus to just look at the clouds! They have seen me laughing and crying and busting a move and absolutely everything in between, and they still love me anyway. Reminiscing on our past semester together got me thinking: what if I committed to loving myself in the way that they love me? Every quirk, every awkward moment, every bad hair day? What could that look like?

In 2026, I am committing to practicing some radical love for myself! No diets, no new workout regimens, no hobbies that won't stick, no harsh comparison. I am posting what I want and saying what I want and wearing what I want and taking up all kinds of space! I am loving my people and loving myself and loving my life. I am loving myself through my last spring semester of college and I am loving myself through graduation and I am loving myself through whatever the next step may be! It's going to be hard and there will be tears and I will be saying goodbye to this place that made me the Gracie you know today. But that hasn't happened yet! So I will love my place now! And I will love the place that comes after that when I get there! And in the meantime, I am not going to be so freaking hard on myself about every little thing all of the time!

One of the coolest things that has ever happened to me is when a friend of mine approached me this past semester and told me, "Hey. I really like your blog. You're a really good writer." At the time, I did not know her well at all, but I thought she was so cool. So you can imagine my shock when one day she just marches right on up to me and says exactly what was on her mind. Imagine if we all did that? Imagine if we just told people what we admired about them in the moment that we thought it? Imagine if we all just decided to channel my friend and have these moments of insane courage and just tell people what we feel when we feel it? Imagine if we just decided to spread a little more love in the world? That would be pretty cool, if you ask me.

This friend of mine actually has a Substack of her own which I will link here. She is also a phenomenal writer, and knowing that now, her initial compliment means even more to me. She is an absolute force to be reckoned with, and I am so lucky to have her on my team! Another one of my good friends has also started a blog of her own this past year called The Wildflower Diaries. I think she captures the way she loves the world so clearly in her posts, it is so beautiful to witness. I used to always say that I thought everyone should have a blog. I would love to amend that statement now. Anyone who wants to have a blog should have a blog. But you have to want it. You have to try.

It takes effort and immense bravery to unlearn to hate yourself. It takes even more effort and bravery to learn to love yourself. It will never be perfect and it is almost always one big jumbled mess, but the fight is worth it in the end. Thinking for yourself is uncomfortable and scary and can make you feel really alone sometimes. But that discomfort and fear and loneliness can also be a powerful indicator that change is happening inside of you. How cool is that? I mean, can you think of how boring this world would be if everything just stayed the same? Change is painful and beautiful and scary and sure, all wrapped into one. We embark on this journey of life with everything we need inside of us already, it's all about learning to trust ourselves along the way.

So mess it all up. What if we just finally give ourselves permission to be human? Make mistakes. Big ones. And then say sorry when you know you have done wrong. Your pride will never be worth more than your relationships and if you are ever feeling sorry for yourself, go find a way to put more love in the world. A mentor of mine used to say that. She would say "give yourself 30 minutes to wallow as hard as you can, and then go do something good for the world." Call a friend, take a drive to admire something in nature, get a sweet treat and maybe a little something for the homeless person on the corner while you are at it, paint something so badly. It doesn't matter! I'll say it again: it doesn't matter! YOU matter! Your life is YOURS. Your Instagram is yours and your TikTok is yours and your clothes are yours and your friends are yours and your apartment is yours and your little idiosyncrasies that make you who you are are yours, yours, yours! Stop giving other people all of this power over your life!

In a world full of critics who are quick to judge, let us be the brave few who seek to understand. When we are comfortable with who we are, it is much harder to be judgmental of others. So much of the pain in today's world stems from insecurity. So many people desire so deeply to be heard. Let's slow down a little more and listen a little more and love a little more. And when we do that, we find that we can finally worry less.

Thank you, my loves, for reading this little blog of mine time and time again. I have decided that words will never do justice to how much your support means to me. I am, if nothing else, a little collector of words and ideas and essays and song lyrics. It is the loveliest thing that has ever happened to me to be able to share this piece of my soul with all of you! Thank you for giving me the space to be Gracie, flaws and all. I pray that you all open your hearts to receiving all of the hope and joy and love that 2026 has to offer. And who knows? Maybe you'll end up with a new toe ring!

Thank you for coming on this journey with me! I hope you've enjoyed your glimpse of Gracie! :)