In the spring of 2014, I bought my first pair of designer shoes. I had just gotten a real grown-up job, and I wanted to treat myself.

And of course, I fell in love. Isn’t that the story with every girl and a pair of shoes?

It was an indulgence to buy such expensive but unwearable shoes. They were on sale, of course. $300 dollars was a lot for me back then.

Like many shoes by Dries Van Noten, this pair was a little off balance. From the front, they look like austere-but-very-high-heeled librarian shoes, covered in glen plaid. From the back, the blocky heels are studded with an elaborate crystal design.

They are somehow masculine and feminine all at once, a weird balance of the two without tipping to much to either side. And the feel incomplete, unfinished, like they require the perfect clothes to bring them to life–also a weird off kilter yet perfectly balanced tightrope walk between masculine and feminine.

There’s a phrase that Alexander Cortes often says: “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” He most often draws parallels between a person’s posture and their approach to life. Your posture–your relationship with gravity–reveals a lot about how you view yourself and your place in the world.

At work this afternoon, I remarked to a coworker that I feel like I’ve never had a “real” job that has challenged me to my fullest capacity. I’ve had jobs that were extremely challenging, that that forced me to learn new skills and completely exhausted my willpower–those are good things to experience.

But I couldn’t shake the thought that I’d never had a job that I consider actual work?

What, then, do I consider work?

After thinking out loud (I like to go on drives and talk to myself–movement is very useful for lubricating the ideas–walks are good too), I sorted out when I’ve felt most accomplished.

My favorite activities have always involved detective work and creating some sort of tangible finished product. Not necessarily together, but those are the things that make me satisfied with a job well done.

• It is work when I’ve discovered something new, especially if it’s something that can be acted upon in the real world
• It is work when I’ve created something that didn’t exist in the world before

Everything else is maintenance. This explains why I don’t get any satisfaction from making my bed or cleaning my house. It’s nice to have a clean house, I guess, but I didn’t learn anything from it and it looks the same as it did the last time it was clean, so what?

Over the years, I’ve contemplated my ideal style. What (or who) would I want to look like? Do I have a style icon to emulate, or a fashion brand to follow?

No of course not. My beauty ideal is a sculptural and polished piece of driftwood, not any human being.

I gravitate over and over toward a mixture of Edwardian British Professor and Elven Fairy Tale Princess tempered with a good dose of classic American sportswear.

I love the challenge and the weird imbalance of mixing two complete opposites on the style spectrum–the heavy, ponderous Oxford look and the light, playfulness of clothes that look like spiderwebs and dew drops.

You could call this look “Librarian Princess” or “A Scholar and a Wood Nymph,” whatever. Maybe even “Fairy Tale Detective.” Sherlock Holmes with fairy dust.

It’s the kind of look that my Dries Van Noten shoes would look right at home again, the kind of look that one might wear to both investigate the truth and to create something new with it.

Grounded in reality yet spinning on flights of fancy.

Is this the way that I do everything? No, not yet. It’s a perfect example of how I aspire to be only me, weaving only the threads that I love and that I alone can see into the larger tapestry of life.

There are glimmers of what I want in other people. Those things are good to study, and to emulate. But the answer is only in me.