Written before May 30. thank you for your supportive messages.

I’ve never been able to settle on an “aesthetic” to base my physical life around. My life has been an abundance of different color schemes and themes, but it has always felt like too much of a commitment to put these themes into practice within my style and decor. I also have the fear that after my phase with that aesthetic is over, I will have a huge clashing graveyard of all of my interests in my room.

I have been doing my usual scrolling on TikTok, and I have been getting a lot of videos where someone will put together a lot of images and videos together around a great song, whether it be themed like Western, Medieval, Y2k, you name it, and they are so appealing to me! All I want to do is just throw myself into all of these worlds at once, and it is so hard to choose.

For the month of June, I wanted to try something new, and center the month around one of these ideas or aesthetics. Since it is summer, I feel like Mermaids would be the most appropriate! I feel like every young girl has had a fascination with mermaids at one point or another, and we have some great media to support this, like The Little Mermaid or the TV series H2O.

Personally, I grew up with both The Little Mermaid and Aquamarine, and with access to my mom’s laptop, I would watch countless videos about mermaids. I remember being baited by the YouTube titles “REAL MERMAID CAUGHT ON CAMERA- SCARY” and being a glutton for punishment, I would take my mom’s laptop into the linen closet so I could watch these videos in the darkness without my mom seeing these “scary” creatures. And what 9 year old wouldn’t be scared, seeing a fully gilled and smooth human/fish creature that was washed up dead on the beach? They were so different than the beautiful mermaids meant for a child’s eye, and with that found footage quality in a crisp 380p, it HAD to be real! I begged my mom for a realistic mermaid tail for at least three years, those scary mermaids did not deter me at all.

When thinking about how I was going to theme my month around mermaids, I decided that while the typical bright and beachy color scheme of coral and turquoise and baby pink were nice, it would be more fun to see how a mermaid aesthetic would fit into what I already own and enjoy. I want to create my own world, if I were a mermaid, what kind of mermaid would I be? Wasn’t that the most fun part of playing mermaids at the pool or beach, asking “What color is your tail?”

Incorporating this theme will be more subtle, seen in music, my crafts, and style. I don’t plan on buying anything extra and I will use what I have. The goal is to just let myself explore without being overwhelmed with choices and get a taste for a new potential life motif. So what kind of mermaid will I be as I swim through June?

Freshwater Mermaid

I love swimming, and Arkansas has an abundance of rivers and lakes that I have swam in since childhood. Geographically, I would be a freshwater mermaid, and I am more than happy to adopt that for my fictional persona going into this month.

I imagine my tail to be… prepare your underwhelming stare… brown :). A dark cool toned brown but has flecks of a bluish iridescence when hit with direct sun, if you can imagine. The thin fins are mostly this cool blue iridescence, shifting between blue and streams of gold. I feel like my childhood self would be so confused to know that I would want a brown tail as opposed to a sparkly hot pink tail that is also simultaneously color changing rainbow and glows in the dark and has a multitude of powers attached to it, but I guess that is life. I am not sad about my tastes turning “dull”, I feel very at peace with my new mer-sona, brown is my favorite color!

And of course you can’t be a mermaid without having a critter companion, and this was very hard to decide on! I’d like to imagine that I befriend every creature in the lake, besides alligators and water moccasins! They are banned. Instead of those, I would have a big ol’ frog as my buddy, so he can go and deter anyone from discovering me by croaking so loudly and annoyingly that they find somewhere else to go hang out.

I definitely feel as if I made this mermaid theme fit into a mold that I created instead of taking it in a more traditional approach, but even just creating this whole idea and story for myself has taught me that I can adopt all of these aesthetics I have been seeing, just in my own way. I’m too used to just accepting what is in front of me and just wish that it would be for me. I put invisible barriers on my own interests, when they actually fit in all along.

I am already feeling more creative, I mean I just drew myself as a mermaid when I haven’t drawn anything just out of my own imagination with a pencil and eraser in months, no references, so starting image as inspiration.

I created a mood board for this month to honor my mer-self, and hopefully you can get an idea of the vibe I went for! All of the photos are from Pinterest.

There will be some tidbits of mermaid magic in the rest of my posts for this month, scattered within whatever I publish. What is your preferred style or theme, and would you ever branch out? What color is your mermaid tail?