Individuality vs Influence

...when identity turns into imitation

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Sometimes I wonder if I actually like the things I say I like.

And lately, I don’t trust the answer as much as I used to.

There’s so much influence now. So much noise. So many recommendations disguised as revelations. We’re told what to wear, how to talk, what to care about, what to buy “before it sells out,” and what version of ourselves we should be performing this week.

I don’t think we’re chasing originality. I think we’re just trying not to fall behind.

And at some point, it gets hard to tell the difference between being inspired—and being absorbed.

It’s not that we’re doing it on purpose. No one wakes up and decides to become a diluted version of someone they follow. It just… happens. A little at a time. Taste erodes in tiny, quiet edits. A borrowed tone. A new filter. A sentence you didn’t mean to copy. Until you start editing yourself to match a version of you that never actually existed, but photographed really well.

Even as I write this, I’ve got a half-filled cart open in another tab—clothes I don’t need, bookmarked by someone whose life I admire but probably wouldn’t survive. I’ve pinned rooms I wouldn’t actually relax in. Saved posts of meals I wouldn’t enjoy eating. Clicked on the same lamp nine times and never once pictured it in my own home.

It’s easy to blame social media for this—but I think it goes deeper. I think a lot of us are just quietly trying to belong. Not even to be liked. Just to be legible. We follow the crowd because it’s easier than asking if we’re still moving in the right direction. We style ourselves into something familiar so we don’t get mistaken for someone who doesn’t know who they are.

And maybe that would be fine—if it stopped at style. But it doesn’t. It starts bleeding into taste. Voice. Identity. You’re not just styling yourself like someone else—you’re talking like them. Thinking like them. Creating like them. Repeating ideas that don’t actually feel true to you, but sound true in someone else’s voice.

And the wild part is that most of the time, you don’t even realize it’s happening.

To be clear— I love being inspired. I love seeing someone do something so specific, so sharp, so them, that it makes me want to be more of myself. There’s nothing wrong with being moved by someone else’s taste. We’re meant to shape each other a little.

But there’s a difference between being inspired by someone—and building your identity inside their outline. One expands you. The other replaces you. The first feels like electricity. The second feels like forgetting. And it’s subtle, because both are flattering, at first. But only one lets you stay in the room as yourself.

You think you’re just paying attention. Being aware. Keeping up.

Until one day you realize you’re not sure what you like anymore—only what’s working.

There’s a specific kind of ache that comes from realizing you’ve started to disappear inside your own choices. You’re buying things that make sense in theory but feel wrong the second they show up. You’re decorating rooms that look like someone else lives there. You’re creating work that technically works, but doesn’t move you. And then you wonder what’s wrong with you—when really, you’ve just been making decisions from someone else’s starting point.

This is where I could say something like “just be yourself.” But I won’t, because it’s lazy advice, and also, it assumes you’ve had uninterrupted access to your “self,” which… most of us haven’t.

I know I haven’t. I know I used to. I know I didn’t always second-guess it. But somewhere between the feed, the market, and the mirror—I got easier to market and harder to recognize.

We’ve been marketed to since childhood. Branded by school, work, peer groups, platforms, algorithms. There’s a version of you who exists entirely in reaction to what the world told you to be. So no—being yourself isn’t obvious. It’s not even always intuitive. Sometimes, it’s something you have to recover.

And the frustrating part is, it’s not always clear what’s yours and what just stuck to you. Some preferences feel like muscle memory—like you’ve been rehearsing someone else’s taste for so long that you’ve started mistaking it for your own. You go along with it. You say “this is so me,” even when it feels a little off, a little tight in the shoulders.

That’s how it happens. You don’t decide to abandon your individuality.

You just stop checking in.

And suddenly, everything you like is something you saw first in someone else’s life. Everything you create sounds a little like the last thing that went viral. Every idea has a shadow over it—a half-remembered caption, an aesthetic filter, a tone that doesn’t quite belong to you but seems to perform better than the one that does.

I’ve created work that I knew would hit. But not because it felt like me. Because it sounded like what usually works.

I’ve bought clothes I knew I wouldn’t wear, but wanted to be the kind of person who could.

I’ve talked myself into liking people, ideas, aesthetics, even entire goals, just because someone I admired liked them first.

I’ve been there. Still end up there more often than I’d like to admit. Especially creatively—where the pressure to be understood sometimes outweighs the urge to be honest. Where you second-guess your instincts before they even finish forming. Where you pull back—not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t match the room.

And then there’s the stuff that hits closer to the bone. Like body image. Like seeing someone wear something you love and believing, deep down, it only worked because they’re built like a runway sketch and you’re not. I’ve cried over pieces of clothing that made me feel like I failed at being a body. Not because the clothes were wrong. But because I was holding myself to the reality of an edited photo in golden hour lighting with seventeen links in the caption and zero proof it ever actually looked like that in real life.

We talk about influence like it’s always a surface-level thing—style, branding, aesthetics. But it’s not. It gets under the skin. It rewires taste. It turns identity into strategy. It starts shaping the way we see ourselves, the way we measure worth, the way we show up.

And if you’re not careful, you start living in a version of yourself that performs well but doesn’t feel like home.

Individuality isn’t about being original. It’s not some perfectly curated self that stands apart.

It’s a practice. A pause. A reflex you have to teach back into your system.

A habit of choosing—even when no one else is watching.

It’s the part of you that makes the less obvious choice. That pauses before the purchase. That changes their mind halfway through a trend cycle. That reads something and doesn’t immediately try to turn it into content. That sits in the mess of not knowing what you like and still refuses to outsource the answer.

It’s inconvenient. Sometimes isolating. Because the truth is, when you stop mirroring everyone else, you don’t always get a replacement identity right away. You just get the space.

And at first, the space feels like failure. But eventually, it starts to feel like freedom.

If there’s any kind of direction I’m moving in, it’s toward that. Toward the quiet relief of liking something without needing it to signal anything. Toward getting dressed without trying to be read like a reference. Toward creating work that sounds like me, even when I’m still figuring out what that actually means.

I don’t have a clean philosophy around it. I’m not against trends, or influence, or inspiration.

I just want to make sure I still exist underneath them.

That the things I like—the ones that stay with me long after they stop being relevant—aren’t just fragments of someone else’s taste I accidentally built a life around.

That’s what I’m recovering.

Not a brand. Not a persona.

Just a throughline.

The one I didn’t borrow. The one that doesn’t need to be seen to be real.

The part that stays, even when everything else cycles out.

File Under: Everything I liked before it was suggested.

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The Ash Files—Where life’s unexpected moments get filed away—sometimes neatly, sometimes under “figure it out later.” From writer/creator ASH, expect weekly musings, honest stories, and a reminder that no one has life entirely figured out [least of all me].✨

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