the "embrace your weirdness" era was never about actually self expression.

this will come across as quite the hot take but i really dont care. as a disclaimer, i can appreaciate that the whole "embrace being weird it's cool to be weird!!" era of the late 2000s and early 2010s was at least letting people experiment with how they would visually express themselves. any outfit i was wearing in 2016 would get me DEATH GLARES today, lol. but the  problem with the whole "it's cool to be weird" era is that it came with two major caveats- it was only actually cool to be "weird" and "unique" if it was:

1. marketable, and

2. palatable. 

lets tackle the "marketable" bit first. the idea of "being weird" was mostly promoted towards kids, and they could get fun and "quirky" clothing to best reflect themselves. heres some stuff i remembered having as a kid as an example:

as fun as these were when i was younger, not everyone is gonna want to wear stuff like this. the problem? if you couldnt find the stuff you wanted to wear at a walmart, target, or generic strip mall, you were never gonna find it, let alone were you getting it cheap. thus, if being we'rd wasnt "marketable," you simply didnt get to participate.

next we have the "palatable" bit. in case you forgot, people were still making fun of you for being neurodivergent or queer, or the movement itself came with a lot of weirdly repackaged sexism and racism (classism too, ill get to that in a bit). for example, being "weird" was often marketed as "not being like the OTHER girls," which resulted in a lot of people grappling with internalized misogyny. for a lot of people of color, embracing their own cultures often lead to innappropriate or uncomfortable interactions with others (ask the average asian kid about how they got treated when they brought lunches to school. racism within this era especially hurt black people, because they were either gatekept for being too black or called "whitewashed" for being too weird. to rope the classism into this, i myself am black, and i dye my own hair. why do i do that when i could go to a salon? because doing it at home is a minimum of 9$ (because i just leave it purple and occasionally touch it up now) and a maximum of 30$ (bleach, dye, gloves, and foil), salons  already charge double that amount, and in my case they'd charge extra because my hair isnt pin straight. a similar sentiment could be said with peircings and tattoos too: theyre expensive to get unless you're planning on getting an infection, and while you could get fake ones, youd have to repeatedly buy them when they go missing, or get used up.

to conclude, while the aesthetics of the whole "be weird" era of the 2010s were pretty great, the era itself was (and kinda is) still heavily flawed. when i say "be weird, be yourself," i mean it. even if you have to make it yourself, even if it isnt "aesthetically pleasing." as long as you arent hurting anyone, keep doing you :)