PrettySerious.
Where desire gets taken seriously, and serious things get to be beautiful.
It’s early Saturday morning in the 90’s.
The fireplace is crackling, throwing amber light across a dimly lit room. There’s a rotation happening in the shower as my sisters and I, one by one, find ourselves wrapped in towels, singing and dancing to RAGE blaring from the TV. Towels clinging to our bodies until it feels warm enough to drop them and scramble for today’s outfit. My mum somewhere in the background of all of it — present, warm, ours.
That little girl didn’t know how to be anything other than fully herself. She wanted to be a pop star. She wanted all eyes on her, always. When adults leaned down to her level and said oh, those eyes — look at those big brown eyes she absorbed it the way that room absorbed firelight. Not greedily. Just openly. The way living things do when they are simply, unguardedly, receiving what the world offers.
She didn’t know yet that wanting to be seen could be dangerous.
I was fourteen. It was a house party I shouldn’t have been at — my mum thought it was a sleepover. I felt the way any deviant teenager feels. Unstoppable. Rebellious. A little bit electric. It was fun, mostly my girlfriends, until some older guys arrived… at first it was fine.
And then it wasn’t.
What happened next I won’t describe in full. Not because I can’t — I have, in the private pages of a journal, years later, when the memories came back like petrol meeting a match.
What I will tell you is this: I pulled up my jeans. Called my mum. Said I’d been drinking, apologised to her. Held myself together until I could cry in the shower. Then cried myself to sleep.
Woke up the next morning and decided it was my fault.
Decided, without knowing I was deciding, that I would make sure it never happened again. That I would never, ever put myself in a position where being seen that way was possible.
I thought I was making a safety decision.
What I was actually doing was making an identity decision. One that would quietly, completely, reshape the next twelve years of my life.
From here, the girl who wanted all eyes on her went very quiet.
Not visibly. From the outside I was fine — better than fine. Academically formidable. Driven. I went to university with the singular intention of being top of my class, and I was. When men complimented my appearance I felt something rise in me that wasn’t quite anger… something rawer than that. “That is the least interesting thing about me.” A sentence I said so many times it carved a groove in my identity. See my mind. See my work. See anything but my surface.
I told anyone who asked, and plenty who didn’t, that I just wasn’t into girly things. Makeup. Clothes. Bags. All of it. Said it so many times it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a fact.
I kept performing. Kept achieving. Kept grinding. Serious about my growth, serious about my business, serious about being serious. Fun was never the opposite of serious for me.
Pretty was.
And so pretty stayed locked away, somewhere safe, somewhere unreachable, while I built and strived and achieved and told myself this was enough.
This was who I was now.
I had quietly accepted, somewhere along the way, that there were two kinds of women. The ones who cared about beautiful things. And the ones who were serious.
And I had chosen a side.
I didn’t understand, at the time, that I had chosen it in terror. That every time I said I’m just not really into all that I was protecting something. Keeping something hidden. The girl in the towel, singing at the top of her lungs on a Saturday morning — I had put her somewhere safe, somewhere no one could reach her, and told her to stay there.
And stay she did.
In January 2019 I decided to organise a charity gala ball. In Tasmania. With three months notice. The event coordinator at the venue told me I was crazy. I smiled and kept going. Tickets sold out the first weekend.
On the 4th of May, in a beautiful room in my small hometown — the first event of its kind we’d ever had — we raised twenty-three thousand dollars for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
It was known that my sister had spent ten years in a violent relationship, and everyone assumed that was the reason I was so passionate about this cause. I let them assume. It was part of it, of course it was.
Nobody knew it was also for me.
Here’s the thing about organising an event for a cause that lives inside your own body — it unlocks things. Quietly, in the in-between hours, the memories came back. Not gently. I sat alone on a Wednesday in February and wrote it all down. Everything I had been carrying. Everything I had gaslit myself out of remembering. I wrote for fourteen-year-old, terrified Caity. I held her. I let her be terrified, finally, somewhere safe on the page.
Writing has always been my safe place. I have always been able to count on the pages to hold me when I’ve struggled to hold myself.
Then I closed the journal. Went back to the seating charts and the centrepieces and the auction items. Like nothing had happened.
The night of the gala, hundreds of people gathered in that beautiful room. They dressed up. They drank champagne. They gave a standing ovation. They toasted strength and resilience and the extraordinary capacity of women to hold each other.
They didn’t know that the woman at the front of the room was also, quietly, toasting herself.
Do I wish they knew? Sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if they would have leaned in more — put down the next glass of champagne and really heard how they could help make an actual impact. I won community awards for months after. People praised me everywhere I went.
And it felt hollow AF.
Like it didn’t land. Like all they wanted was to dress up and feel good and go home. Like the pretty of it had completely swallowed the seriousness of it whole.
And so it reinforced the belief I had been carrying since I was fourteen years old.
Pretty isn’t the way. Stay serious.
And I did. For a while longer.
But pretty is patient.
She doesn’t knock loudly. She slips love letters under the door of the locked room and waits.
A pull toward a luxury store I hadn’t felt before. A styling appointment that surprised me with how alive it made me feel. Something shifting on the inside that the outside was trying, tentatively, to catch up to. Small things. Quiet things. Easy to dismiss and harder, each time, to ignore.
Three of my girlfriends took me to Mecca Cosmetica. My first time ever inside that store — the one I had always rushed past, too embarrassed to walk in as a thirty-year-old woman with absolutely no idea where to look or what to do, while twelve-year-olds worked the aisles with pure, unbothered conviction.
Standing there with my girls, I felt like a woman who had spent years in the most sensible, practical, posturpedic shoes imaginable — and had just stepped, for the first time, into glass slippers. Unable to fully walk in them yet. Standing in them nonetheless.
Ninety dollars for foundation? I heard myself think. The old voice. The sensible one. We don’t do this.
I bought the foundation.
Now I walk past Mecca and smell the store from the doorway and somehow leave three hundred dollars lighter. Something in me has been making up for lost time, and she is not sorry about it.
I started stepping into luxury stores. Tentatively at first, then with more ease. I invested in personal styling. I started learning — slowly, joyfully, like relearning a language I always suspected was my mother tongue — how to let the outside finally reflect something true about the inside.
And then came Melbourne.
Girls’ trip. Chadstone Shopping Centre. We wandered into Christian Louboutin and I said — lightly, the way you say things when you’re about to do something that will matter — I’ll just try them on.
The grin on my face made my cheeks hurt.
I walked around the store. Sat down. Stood up. Sat back down again. Crossed my legs to see the soles — that flash of red. That specific, almost startling red that Louboutin borrowed from Andy Warhol’s Flowers — a secret that only reveals itself when a woman is in motion, when she’s walking away or climbing stairs or crossing her legs in a room full of people who suddenly, quietly, notice.
They’re nice, aren’t they? I said to my friend, absolutely smirking.
They’re gorgeous, she said. She knew.
I decided I couldn’t. $1,800 for heels was absurd, obviously. I sat there quietly searching for something — not permission exactly, but a frame. A meaning large enough to hold them.
It’s your birthday this week, my friend offered.
Yes.
I’ll take them.
Champagne. Genuine giggles. Tissue paper. The most expensive shoes I now own being placed into a bag like something ceremonial, which is exactly what it was.
And here is what I need you to understand, because it matters for everything: it wasn’t that I needed to feel worthy of them. It was that I needed there to be meaning. A random Tuesday would have felt empty — not because I didn’t deserve them, but because I am a person for whom objects without stories are simply objects. To buy something beautiful with no frame around it feels, to me, like eating without tasting. Like existing without paying attention.
To exist without meaning is, in some essential way, to barely exist at all.
Pretty was finding her way back. Slowly, incrementally, through every luxury store and styling appointment and pair of red-soled shoes. She was relearning how to move through me.
And I was, finally, letting her.
And then came the moment that blew the door completely open.
Someone I love looked at me and said three words that stopped time.
She owns you.
Said about me. To me. By someone who loves me.
And in those words — something broke open.
The fact that someone I love so deeply could assume that someone else owned me. Like I was a dog rather than a sovereign being. It was the most visceral, energetic pushback I have ever felt move through my body. Every cell rejecting it simultaneously. I remember the exact quality of the silence that followed. The way the air in the room changed.
And then, quietly, everything else fell too.
It was the single thread that, when pulled, unravelled the straightjacket of stories and limiting beliefs I had been wearing for more than twelve years.
The underdog. The poor girl from Tasmania. The serious one. The not-girly one. The girl who didn’t need beautiful things because she had her intellect, thank you very much.
One by one they fell.
The whole architecture of an identity built on survival — the walls I had constructed so carefully, so cleverly, so completely that I had forgotten they were walls and started calling them personality — came loose all at once and began to fall.
I didn’t try to catch it.
I stood in the rubble and I let myself feel the full, terrifying, exhilarating freedom of having nothing left to protect.
And in that space — that raw, open, undefended space — I got to ask myself, perhaps for the first time ever, a completely honest question.
Who are you, without the story?
Not the survivor. Not the academic. Not the serious one. Not the girl who doesn’t need things.
Just you.
What do you want?
The answer came quietly, the way true things do.
She wanted to be seen.
She always had.
As within, so without.
An ancient hermetic principle, thousands of years old. And yet it might as well have been written for this — for the woman who finally lets herself want something beautiful out loud and realises that the outside has always been a reflection of the inside. That it couldn’t do anything else.
What we reach for always, always, reflects something moving inside us.
The Cartier Panthère on my wrist is not just a watch. It is a woman — Jeanne Toussaint, la panthère — who refused to be decorative in a world deeply invested in women being decorative. The panther became her signature because it embodied something she lived: power that doesn’t announce itself. Beauty with teeth. When it sits on my wrist I am not simply wearing Cartier. I am in conversation with a lineage. I am making a quiet statement about the kind of woman I have decided to be.
And the Birkin — the one I don’t have yet, and I love that I don’t have it yet — you cannot simply buy it. You have to play the game. There are conversations to be had, relationships to build, a whole world to enter and earn your place within on its own terms. It is a mission, if you want it to be. A delicious, entirely optional evolution of the woman you are and the connections you carry. The wanting of it is woven into the pleasure of it. The game itself is half the gift.
This is what Michael Jordan and Nike understood in 1984, sitting in a room together and betting everything on a story that hadn’t been written yet. The shoe was never the point. The point was the mythology they were building around a man standing at the edge of becoming someone the world hadn’t seen before. One company believed it first. They made it physical. They put it on his feet.
Forty years later we still feel it.
Because objects that carry genuine stories don’t age.
They compound.
I spent years quietly judging women who cared about beautiful things. Painted them with the brush of being materialistic. Told myself I was too serious, too evolved, too intelligent to be moved by surfaces. I wore my indifference like a second skin and underneath it, without quite knowing, I was also judging myself. Punishing myself for the wanting. Keeping the exile going long past the point where it was keeping me safe.
I know now what that judgement was.
A mirror. Pointed directly at the part of me I had locked away at fourteen and told to keep quiet.
And here is the thing that makes me emotional when I sit with it fully — the thing that feels so much larger than I ever expected: for all those years I believed the paradox was real. That pretty and serious were opposites. That a woman could be intelligent or beautiful, deep or desiring, philosophical or magnificently dressed — yet never both. Not without apology. Not without one diminishing the other.
This was never true.
It was a story told to women to keep us small. To keep us choosing. To keep us perpetually apologising for whichever half we were currently inhabiting — too frivolous when we leaned into beauty, too cold when we leaned into depth, never quite right, never quite enough, always negotiating the terms of our own wholeness.
I am done negotiating.
The reason I’m telling you all of this is because I know she’s in there.
The version of you who wanted more before she learned to want less. Before she learned that wanting to be seen was dangerous, or frivolous, or a sign of not being serious enough.
She’s been quiet for a while. But she hasn’t left.
Maybe she shows up as a pull toward a beautiful object you keep talking yourself out of. Maybe she’s the flicker of something when you see a woman who moves through the world with her whole self on display. Maybe she’s that private, slightly embarrassing desire to walk into a room and simply be magnificent — the one you’ve never said out loud because it felt like a confession.
It’s not a confession. It’s a compass.
Pretty Serious exists for that woman. The one who is accomplished and intelligent and done — done — apologising for whichever half of herself she happens to be inhabiting right now. The one who is curious about what her judgements are protecting, about the depth of her own desire, about all the places she has quietly, politely, allowed less than what she actually wants.
This is a space where beautiful things are treated as the serious business of self-creation that they always were. Where a watch is a lineage. Where a red sole is a mythology. Where the game of acquiring something extraordinary is one of life’s genuine pleasures and nobody has to pretend otherwise. Where desire is a map and objects are markers and the woman who knows exactly what she wants — and has the interior life to understand why — is not shallow.
She is paying the deepest possible attention.
As within, so without.
Everything you reach for is saying something. The question is whether you’ve given yourself permission to hear it.
I spent twelve years not hearing it. Years like ink diluted in water — present, technically, but dispersed past recognition. Performing serious. Containing pretty. Keeping the girl in the firelight hidden somewhere safe.
I am thirty-three years old. I grew up in Tasmania. I have big brown eyes and red-soled shoes and a Cartier Panthère on my wrist and a Birkin I am very much in the game for. I write about the philosophy of beautiful things and the beautiful things of philosophy. I raised twenty-three thousand dollars in a room full of people who didn’t know they were also celebrating me.
I am the woman that fourteen-year-old girl was trying to survive into.
She made it.
And she is pretty serious about it.
Welcome to Pretty Serious. I’m Caity Walker — coach, writer, and devoted student of the why beneath the what. This is where desire gets taken seriously, and serious things get to be beautiful. Subscribe, share and stick around x
🤍 Thankyou for being you.
This is an epic piece Caity. Seriously epic and impactful and bold.