Showing Up as Her

A while ago, I was having dinner with a friend, and we started chatting about becoming adults and how far we’ve grown, not mentally or emotionally, but in very vapid ways, such as our hair and makeup.

Now I say vapid, not in a mean way or anything, but at the end of the day, those things aren’t the most important ones. But they are still there. We were talking about makeup, about the looks we love, and at some point, she said something that stayed with me: “I might need to grow up, do some neutrals”.

Of course, I told her how I felt about this idea. But I kept turning it over in my mind long after our conversation.

Around the same time, as the year was coming to a close, I was looking at a lot of decluttering videos. You know the ones, people with overflowing collections, determined to squeeze everything into a single makeup bag because they’ve decided it’s time to become a minimalist.

They are not so different from the people making videos where they remove all the colour from their wardrobes for the same reason. And this is coming from someone whose favourite colour is brown.

What stayed with me wasn’t really the makeup or the clothes themselves, but the assumption underneath it all, that growing up looks a certain way. How many of us are the victims of that?

We might feel that adulthood is neutral tones, edited versions of ourselves, quieter choices. And maybe I am jumping on my feminist high horse here, but why are we dulling our shine? Why are we giving up the things we love, the colour in our lives, because we have grown up?

We have grown up in glitter, so let us sparkle now. Maturity is not something we achieve by sanding ourselves down. We don’t put that on others; we don’t take that on from men. Or from mothers, for that matter.

Being an adult has nothing to do with whether we wear colour or not. If you feel your best in bright pink, orange, or yellow, then showing up as her means wearing exactly that. If you love a smoky eye or a red lip, then you show up as her. And if you feel your best self with a bit of lip balm and sunscreen, then my love, you show up as her.

None of these choices tells us anything about our worth, about our maturity. They don’t define our depth or our intelligence. They’re simply a way for us to show up as ourselves, and good God, that is what our grandmamas fought for. We are never going to please everyone, so we might as well try to please ourselves.

Of course, decluttering isn’t a bad thing. Donating things or selling them can be great, necessary even. I wear my clothes until they don’t fit right or until they don’t look good/feel good. Then I donate them to an organisation that either sells them here, gives them away for free (to the homeless population), sends them to other countries where they are given away for free, or the material is repurposed to make new things.

If we throw things out, we do this in the way we should. For my family, this means that we put things where they belong, be it the compost bin, the paper bin, the plastic bin, the glass bin, or general waste. And if it fits nowhere, we bring it to the tip.

Declutering and reinventing shouldn’t be about becoming someone new, no, it’s about making space for all the pieces that make you you, so that you too can show up as her.

Maybe that’s what growing up really is. Not learning how to look great in brown eyeshadow or high-necked tops if we don’t love those things (ironically enough, I do). It’s about knowing who you are to your core and showing up as her. No apologies, no doubt. So here, if you ever need it, this is your permission.

Go sparkle, darling, show up as her.