The Design of Being

The Design of Being is a collection of philosophical essays written across years of study, doubt, discipline, and becoming. They are not reactions to the world, but deliberate constructions within it attempts to understand freedom, consciousness, morality, femininity, and authorship from the inside out.

These texts do not seek agreement.

The design of being is never final. It is revised through doubt, refined through experience, strengthened through solitude, and expressed through choice.

Style has always been my first language, not fashion as spectacle, but as proportion, restraint, and internal coherence.

Philosophy became the architecture behind that instinct. Through skepticism, stoicism, existentialism, and political thought, I came to understand that identity is not inherited. It is constructed.

To live is to design.

Everything you wear is a copy of something you havent seen yet

There is a strange, almost unconscious thing about getting dressed that no one really discusses.

You stand in front of your wardrobe, you choose something, you put it on, and for a moment it feels right. Not because it is new, expensive, or even particularly beautiful, but because it fits something you cannot fully explain.

Later, that feeling disappears.
You buy more. You try again.

Most people think this has to do with taste, trends, or identity. But it is actually something much deeper. Fashion is usually understood as surface. Trend. Image.

It is associated with what appears, what is visible, and what is constantly replaced. Something that belongs to the present moment and almost immediately to the past. But if we look more closely, fashion is not only about appearance. It is also about what persists beneath it. About what remains, even as everything else changes.

This is where Plato becomes relevant. Plato proposes that reality exists on two levels.

There is the world of appearances: everything we see, touch, and experience. And there is the world of Forms: perfect, eternal, unchanging ideas that exist beyond what is visible. This distinction opens questions that feel unexpectedly close to fashion.

Can fashion move from appearance to essence?
Can a garment participate in something permanent?

Everything we encounter in the world is an imperfect version of something more real.

A chair is not the chair. It is an approximation of the idea of a chair.
Beauty is not what we see. It is what we recognize in what we see.
Justice is not any single act, but the idea behind it.

Reality is not what we see. Reality is what things participate in.

Fashion, especially today, exists almost entirely in the world of appearances.

It is structured around:

seasonal cycles
trend replacement
constant novelty
visual consumption

A garment is often valued not for what it is, but for what it represents in a given moment. It matters because it is new, because it is seen, because it circulates. In these terms, fashion is placed at the lowest level of reality. It produces copies of copies. It moves endlessly without ever arriving at something stable. It never reaches essence.

If fashion remains at the level of appearance, something essential is lost.

Nothing is stable.
Nothing accumulates meaning.
Nothing becomes real.

A garment does not become. It only passes. And this has consequences that go beyond clothing itself. It creates a disconnection from identity, from time, and from memory. Clothes stop being part of life and become part of a cycle. Without Form, fashion cannot hold truth.

What happens if we shift the way we understand fashion?

What if a garment is not just an image, but an attempt to participate in Form?

Then clothing is no longer just an object, or a look. It becomes something else entirely: an approximation of something more permanent.

A piece can aim toward:

proportion
balance
presence
a form of beauty that is not dependent on trend

This changes the role of design. It is no longer reactive. It is not about responding to what is new. It becomes a process of seeking. Of getting closer to something that already exists, even if it cannot be fully seen.

If we follow this idea, the wardrobe itself changes meaning. It is no longer a collection of isolated pieces, but a system. A structure where garments relate to each other. Where each piece gains meaning through its position within a whole. Nothing exists entirely on its own. Everything participates in something larger. This is, in essence, a Platonic structure. Meaning does not exist in isolation. It emerges through relation. A wardrobe built this way is not defined by accumulation, but by coherence.

Plato also suggests that knowledge is not something we acquire for the first time, but something we remember. He calls this recollection.

There is a way in which this idea extends into clothing. A garment that remains in your life begins to accumulate memory. It becomes associated with moments, with transitions, and with versions of yourself. Over time, it stops being just material. It becomes something closer to meaning. This is why certain pieces feel different. Why some clothes can be passed down, can continue to exist beyond the moment they were created.

They are no longer just objects. They become carriers of continuity. In this sense, fashion moves closer to Form.

If we take this seriously, the role of the designer changes.

The designer is not someone who creates arbitrary forms.

The designer becomes someone who tries to access something that already exists and translate it into material.

An architect of proportion.
A mediator between idea and object.
A translator of the invisible into the visible.

Design is no longer just production. It becomes interpretation.

Fashion does not have to remain in the world of appearances. It can move toward something deeper.

Toward garments that persist.
Toward systems that hold meaning.
Toward forms that are not exhausted by time.

In this sense, good design is not about novelty. It is about proximity to truth

This way of thinking has slowly shaped how I approach clothing. Not as something to constantly replace, but as something to build. Not as isolated pieces, but as a system that can be lived in over time.

A wardrobe that does not chase meaning, but allows it to accumulate.

In a world saturated with opinions, judgment, and the constant pressure to know, there is something quietly radical about choosing not to decide. The earliest skeptics believed that suspending judgment leads to tranquility, that peace arises not from certainty, but from the refusal to cling to it. To doubt, in their view, was not to despair but to dwell in openness, to allow the world to remain ambiguous and alive. Descartes took doubt in another direction, turning it into a method to rebuild knowledge from the ground up. His methodical skepticism led him to the famous conclusion:

Cogito, ergo sum

I think, therefore I am.

Yet this reflects a desire to conquer uncertainty, to build a fortress of reason against the unknown. Pyrrho’s skepticism offers an alternative: not to solve doubt, but to coexist with it. In his vision, peace is found not through mastery, but through the gentle art of letting go. Atheism, so often framed as negation, can also be seen as a form of philosophical stillness. To not believe is not to rage against belief, but to accept the absence of certainty with grace. Without gods, we are not abandoned but returned to ourselves. The absence of divine authority clears space for reflection, responsibility, and truth-telling. It is not a void, it is a beginning.

Rather than seeking salvation in a higher power, the Stoic cultivates clarity, resilience, and moral strength in the face of life’s unpredictability. Stoicism teaches us to desire less, to control what we can, our response, and to live with dignity amidst uncertainty. It asks us to find meaning not in promises of eternity, but in the excellence of how we live now. Without gods, morality becomes an interior construction. Ethics no longer rely on fear or the divine, but on coherence, between action and intention, value and behaviour. To live well becomes an act of authorship. Simone de Beauvoir called this ambiguous freedom: the burden and beauty of making meaning ourselves. It is a form of ethical elegance, to live intentionally, to shape a life that reflects thought, empathy, and experience.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, explored how Western morality emerged not from spiritual truth but from historical resentment. What we call “good” and “evil,” he argued, was shaped by power struggles, not divine insight. Religion, especially Christianity, inverted values: strength became sin, and submission became virtue. Nietzsche called for a revaluation of all values, a bold return to instinct, vitality, and creation. In this light, atheism becomes not rejection, but reinvention. It is not the end of meaning, but the beginning of freedom.

This freedom opens the door to creative life. Without inherited structures telling us who we are or what to worship, we become the artists of our existence. We are free to design values, aesthetics, and rituals that speak truthfully to our experiences. Atheism, lived well, becomes the discipline of self-creation. There is also a distinct femininity in this posture, a cool refusal to be defined by others, a magnetic ambiguity. In a world that demands belief, performance, and certainty, the atheist woman is unreadable by design. She does not argue, she embodies. She doesn’t cling to absolutes, but neither does she dissolve into meaninglessness. Her strength lies in her self-possession, in her ability to live ethically and elegantly, with no god to blame or beg.

Ambiguity, then, becomes an aesthetic. Not confusion, but complexity. Not indecision, but intentional opacity. Just as design finds beauty in what is left unsaid, this worldview embraces silence and nuance. There is dignity in restraint. There is allure in not answering every question. In skepticism and stoicism, there is a poetic ethic: one that chooses presence over pretence, tension over dogma, mystery over myth. To live without gods is to pay deeper attention. Not to some metaphysical order, but to what is here now, being mindful. This is not spiritual blindness; it is an ethical gaze. It is the choice to care precisely because there is no reward. Meaning becomes an act of attention, not a gift from above.

The beauty of unknowing is not a theory. It is a way of being. It is the grace to say “I don’t know” without anxiety. It is the strength to build meaning in silence. Reading and learning how to question things through philosophy led me here. The more I studied how the world works, its systems of belief, its political structures, its moral codes, the more I understood how deeply our ideas of purpose are shaped by history, trauma, and power. I learned that religion was not born from truth but from need, from early humans confronting chaos and mortality, creating gods to make sense of death, nature, and suffering. Religion is often for those who need an explanation, who cannot bear the ambiguity of life without a promised narrative.

It has been freeing, to release the inherited idea that my existence must be justified by something beyond me. I no longer need to be watched to act with care. I no longer need permission to feel wonder, or to be good. What once felt like faith now feels like confinement. I have stopped fearing punishment for simply thinking.

De omnibus dubitandum est

Everything must be doubted

This has become not just a philosophical motto, but a lived ethic. I no longer accept any truth without turning it over in my hand. This doubt is not corrosive; it is clarifying. It cuts away superstition, inherited guilt, and fear-based obedience. It reveals what is real, what is mine, what is chosen. It gives me the freedom to create from the ground up, with intention, integrity, and style. What began as doubt has become healing. This worldview has softened my inner critic, soothed existential anxiety, and helped me become more aware of the present. When the need for certainty dissolves, what remains is presence. And in this presence, I have found a quiet joy, one that does not need to be explained or eternal to matter. This is the beauty of unknowing, a life unburdened by false answers. It is not emptiness, it is freedom.

On the Beauty of Unknowing

In Order to Register Pain, Consciousness is Necessary

For years I treated pain purely as a problem to be solved, rather than as information to be processed. Epictetus once said, “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.” The difference lies not in whether pain exists but in whether we can transform it into wisdom, strength, and meaning.

My instinct when I hurt is to sleep, Xanax when I wake up and just convince myself to sleep all day (my year of rest of relaxation vibes). Sleep feels like the only way to silence the ache in my chest and the heaviness in my body, it felt like it was my only escape. Nevertheless, Marcus Aurelius reminded me, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it.” When you sit with discomfort long enough to hear what it’s trying to tell you, suffering becomes more than endurance, it becomes instruction.

The question shifts: not how can I stop this pain? But what can this pain teach me that will serve my growth?

This is not something easy to achieve, as it requires developing a different relationship with suffering and rewiring your thought process: one that includes both compassion for your own pain and curiosity about what it might be trying to communicate as there is a possibility that those situations contain lessons.

When I lived behind the medication, I felt dulled. Life was foggy, automatic, and monotonous. Empathy for myself dimmed. I started to question existence as a whole. I felt myself drifting toward existing without presence.

Now I have chosen to return to consciousness. Sontag’s words stayed with me: “In order to register pain, consciousness is necessary.” Medicine softened everything and kept me from my extremes, but also from my depths. I am relearning what it means to feel: the nervousness of seeing someone I like, the spark of excitement, the joy I thought I had forgotten. Nietzsche was right: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

I'm living the return of my consciousness, living life on softened emotions that kept me from my extremes and dulled my emotions and feelings. As I've grown and matured I've learned to cope in ways that I didn't think possible. I've started to feel again, and the best part is that I've started to feel things that I forgot I had the capability to feel. I've shifted my mentality from seeing my sensibility as something negative to something positive, and that has changed the way I live my life.

Perhaps this is what it means to be alive, not to be spared from heaviness, but to accept it as part of the same current that carries wonder as it brings love, beauty, art and meaning possible.

Pain and joy are not opposites but companions, both signs that I am conscious, both proof that I am alive. To feel again, the heaviness of it all, is to return to the very essence of being human.

To create is not simply to make something new. It is to take responsibility for how one exists in the world.

I have never understood creation as excess or self-expression for its own sake. For me, creation begins with restraint. With choosing what deserves form, what deserves time, what deserves to remain. In that sense, creation is never neutral. It reveals how we understand value, how we relate to time, how present we are willing to be. What we make always carries a worldview, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Fashion is often dismissed as superficial, reduced to spectacle, novelty, and trend cycles. This dismissal misunderstands its potential. When approached with thought, fashion becomes a way of thinking through the body. It is not decoration, but mediation between inner clarity and outer reality, between the self and the world. Clothing shapes how we inhabit space, how we move through time, how we allow ourselves to be seen. To dress is not simply to adorn the body. It is a daily decision about presence. A quiet articulation of how one chooses to exist.

Creation begins with attention. To create is to say: this matters. In a world saturated with images, speed, and constant production, attention becomes an ethical act. What we choose to design, wear, or repeat reflects what we believe is worthy of care. I am drawn to forms that resist disposability, to objects and garments designed to be lived in, revisited, and remembered. Durability is not nostalgia; it is a refusal of amnesia.

The political and social climate inevitably enters the act of creation. We do not create outside of history, but within systems that shape desire, regulate bodies, and reward certain forms of visibility. In moments of acceleration and instability, creation often mirrors the surrounding chaos, louder, faster, more demanding. Choosing slowness in a culture of urgency is not withdrawal. It is discernment. Fashion, in particular, is deeply entangled with power.

Political systems inscribe themselves onto bodies through norms of productivity, gender, and beauty. They dictate how bodies should appear, move, and behave. To design clothing that respects the body rather than disciplines it, that allows movement rather than restriction, is to question how authority operates at the most intimate level. Here, politics is not abstract, it is felt physically, through fabric, weight, and gesture.

Creation is also an act of authorship. Meaning is not inherited, it is constructed. To create is to refuse passivity, to doubt what is handed down, and to assume responsibility for form. I am interested in coherence rather than performance, in integrity rather than validation. Style, in this sense, is not an image but a posture, the alignment between inner clarity and outer form.

Material choice carries its own philosophy. To work with textiles that age, endure, and retain memory is to acknowledge time rather than deny it. Against synthetic immediacy and visual excess, natural fibers and considered construction express care, patience, and respect. There is something ethical in allowing materials to speak honestly, to hold weight, texture, and history. To create fashion, then, is to treat design as a form of thinking.

Each garment becomes a quiet proposition about how to exist: how to move through the day, how to appear without spectacle, how to relate to the world without being consumed by it. In a culture driven by visibility and algorithmic relevance, this kind of creation does not demand attention. It waits. It endures.

Creation, for me, is not about imposing form onto the world, but about responding to it with lucidity. It is a way of remaining coherent under pressure, of translating values into matter, of treating the body as a site of meaning rather than a surface for display. Fashion, when created with intention, becomes part of an examined life, a philosophy worn daily, quietly and without explanation.

On Creation

On Taste

People often want to categorize their taste, even to the point of justification. Theres an expectations that preferences should be legible, traceable and supported by references. I tend to trust on how my eyes register things, whether something feels right or not, without feeling the need to translate that response into a framework.

Sometimes this way of seeing could be described as a “campy” eye. Not in a a playful or ironic sense, but in the sense that what catches my attention doesn’t always alight with what is commonly agreed upon as “beautiful” To a. more “conventional” or untrained gaze, it might read as awkward, unresolved or even ugly. I dont experience it that way. Im often more interested in tension than harmony, in things that feel slightly off rather than perfectly resolved.

tase, for me, doesn’t come from wanting to portray something or signal belonging to a certain category. Im not trying to place myself within a lineage or a scene. it forms more quietly, through proximity to my own life and surroundings. I pay attention to what i live with, what i return to and what i dont get tired of. Over time, these observations shape my choices more than any external reference ever could.

Im drawn to objects, clothes, images and ideas that exist without conviction. Things that dont seem overly sure of themselves. Things that belong to the mundane rhythm of living rather than to moments of display.

Ive tried, gradually to cut ties with excess, as it tends to dull meaning or replace it altogether. When everything is emphasis, nothing really holds weight. I find myself disengaging from trends that resurface every few months or years only to collapse once they've been over-consumed. The cycle feels predictable, and predictability drains my interest quickly.

What holds my attention is durability. Not only in a material sense, but in a perceptual one. Im interested in whether something can be returned to without losing its relevance, whether it can exist across time without needing constant reinforcement.

In that sense, taste feels less like an identity a more like a way of moving. A series of small, reaped choices shaped by attention, fatigue curiosity and refusal. It's not something I feel compelled to defined. What feels right usually proves itself through time.

Before it was mine, ballet was my mother’s. She practiced all her life. Professionally and in practice I witness how she did it not for applause or recognition. It was simply part of her structure. A discipline she returned to again and again, like prayer but without spectacle. I grew up watching her posture more than her movement. The way she stood. The way her shoulders never collapsed. The way her hands remained soft but intentional. Even when she wasn’t dancing, ballet lived in her body.

I think I absorbed that before I ever named it. Now, when I stand at the barre, I feel that inheritance physically. It is not nostalgia. It is continuity. A quiet thread between two women, across time, across different ambitions, sharing the same geometry of first position. I am beginning to understand, is not just movement. It is philosophy embodied.

I have always believed that elegance lies in proportion. That restraint is more powerful than excess. That chicness is not an outfit but a worldview, something inhabited rather than displayed. Ballet is the physical articulation of that belief. It is geometry made flesh. It is discipline without noise. It is the body treated as architecture and I now wonder why I didn’t start earlier.

In Ballet you cannot fake turnout. You cannot rush balance. You cannot negotiate with gravity. The mirror is honest in a way that few things in life are. It shows you exactly where you are misaligned. And alignment, I’ve learned, is never accidental. It is practiced.

In my writing, I often return to the idea that freedom is not something granted but something authored. Ballet teaches that lesson more clearly than any essay. The body becomes free not through chaos but through control. Not through looseness but through cultivated precision. There is a paradox here: the more disciplined you become, the more effortless you appear. The more rigorously you train, the lighter you seem. This is the kind of femininity I believe in.

Not loud. Not desperate for validation. Not theatrical. But contained. Measured. Refined.

Ballet holds contradiction beautifully. It is softness built on strength. It is grace supported by trembling muscles. It is delicacy constructed through relentless repetition. Watching my mother practice all her life taught me that this kind of strength endures. Ballet did not disappear from her body as she aged. It remained in the way she entered rooms, in the steadiness of her gaze, in her refusal to collapse inward. It shaped her design. And perhaps that is why I am drawn to it now, at this particular moment in my life. I live intensely in thought, in philosophy, in writing, in abstraction. Ballet pulls me back into physical reality. It humbles me. It exposes my impatience. It forces me to feel my limits rather than intellectualise them.

You cannot think your way into balance. You must hold it.

There is something healing in the repetition. The counting organizes chaos. The ritual quiets anxiety. Each tendu, each plié, each correction becomes a small act of attention. And attention, as I have come to believe, is the foundation of integrity. When you are at the barre, you cannot drift. You are either present or you fall.

Ballet demands consciousness. You feel everything: the tightness in your hips, the instability in your ankles, the tremor in your calves. There is no numbing yourself inside a movement that requires full awareness. To register discomfort, consciousness is necessary. And in that awareness, something subtle shifts. Pain becomes information. Limitation becomes instruction. It mirrors the way I think about life itself.

My mother returned to it for decades. Now I return too. Not because I aspire to be a dancer. Not because I seek performance. But because ballet feels like an extension of everything I already believe: that presence is built through daily decisions; that femininity can be disciplined; that elegance is cultivated, not accidental.

There is something profoundly moving about realizing that I am practicing the same positions my mother practiced thousands of times before me. When I lift my arms into fifth, I know she has done the same gesture in a different studio, in a different year, with a different version of herself. We are separate, but in that moment, we share alignment.

Ballet becomes more than exercise. It becomes inheritance. It becomes a silent dialogue between generations. It becomes proof that discipline can be transmitted without words. If to live is to design, then ballet is part of that design. It refines the spine. It refines the will. It refines the relationship between effort and appearance.

It teaches me that elegance is not about being seen. It is about coherence. It is about the outside reflecting the inside without contradiction. Ballet does not reward spectacle. It rewards consistency. It rewards humility. It rewards the quiet decision to try again. Perhaps that is its deepest philosophy.

My mother practiced all her life. Now I practice too.