What are the things that LIGHT UP your heart? (like this glitter coat)

HELLO FABULOUS PEOPLE! 

I wanted to pop in and show you my fantastic glitter coat. 

I scored this beauty for twenty-five cents at a yard sale in rural Vermont, and once I saw it I could not walk away (even before I knew she only wanted a quarter for it). 

Because this thing LIT UP MY HEART. I felt like a toddler, overflowing with glee while beholding this ridiculous shiny joy bomb. (Even as my cautionary adult voice was trying to tell me that it’s too ridiculous to be seen in public with.) Luckily the critical voice was no match for my inner toddler, who handed over the coin, put it on and started twirling around in the sunlight giggling. 

The day I got it:   I AM A HUMAN DISCO BALLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!

And then I kept twirling and giggling ALL DAY LONG. That was several years ago, and I’m sad to say that I’m not sure that I've worn it out in public since that very first day. 

Maybe it’s because I had been on vacation visiting friends that I felt extra-light-hearted on the day I crossed its path. Maybe when I came back to the responsibilities of my “real life” the adult voice was used to having its way.

Cue the Cautionary Adult Voice:  "It’s irresponsible to go out in public looking like that. You’ll confuse people. People will stare. You don’t want to be irresponsible, and you certainly don’t want to be stared at."

So It went in the closet where I smiled at it wistfully. Eventually it made its way to the costume bins in my storage unit  - too good to part with, but too unacceptable to adopt into everyday adult life. 

This past summer, in a giant downsizing effort, I went through my costume bins (I had FOUR of those puppies locked away out of sight) and re-discovered the rodeo jacket. (Did I mention it was originally part of a RODEO COSTUME?! Doesn’t that just make you love it even more?!) 

It still lit up my heart, but now the joy was also mixed with guilt and resignation. I haven’t worn it in YEARS. When will I ever have an “appropriate” occasion to wear this thing? There will most likely NEVER be an occasion to wear this that my cautionary adult voice will approve of. Halloween and theme parties. How sad is it that I had FOUR big-ass tupperware bins full of clothes that are only acceptable to wear once or twice a year? 

As I type these words, I’m getting present to this theme in my life. Who I really am, all the stuff that makes my heart light up, on fucking LOCKDOWN because I have this cautionary voice basically telling me that it’s unacceptable and no one will love me if I let myself be seen. Heartbreaking. 

And I imagine that most, if not all, of you lovely folks reading this will be able to relate. It is a near-universal experience. We get told by our parents, “No, honey, you can’t wear your tutu/cape/fluorescent leg-warmers/etc to school/the mall/thanksgiving dinner.” And our parents are simply just trying their best to protect us from that cruel cruel world. We don’t want to offend Grandma. Or get sent home from school. Or make anyone look bad. 

I was STILL getting sent back upstairs to change into something more appropriate for Thanksgiving dinner in my late twenties. True story. And at the time it was super disheartening. My heart responded by feeling simultaneously angry/rebellious/resigned/sad. And that experience became a defining one in my memory for YEARS. Have to dress APPROPRIATE. Pleasing others is better than pleasing myself.

So almost exactly one year ago, I had just graduated from my year-long coach training program and was about to step into a new role as a Mentor Coach for the next round of CTP participants. It was a huge jump in leadership and responsibility and a huge jump in the gradient of doing my own inner work. The first Saturday morning, around 6am, I’m staring into the mirror at the hostel agonizing over what to wear. I had a totally suitable dress picked out. I had just gotten some new acceptable shoes for the occasion. And I desperately wanted to wear my hot pink leg-warmers. It was really cold outside and I would be walking quite a bit. Plus they were fun. I loved them and they lit up my heart. I was about to walk into a really rigorous 12-hour work day training new coaches and I wanted to do it RIGHT. Finally, after agonizing about it for 15 minutes, I just decided to do it. Wear the hot pink leg-warmers. Own it. Just own it. You want to. Just freaking stop already and go with it. 

In the end no one said a word about my legwarmers being inappropriate. I even got a compliment from one of the participants who found them just as delightful as I did. The whole time though, I was so busy second guessing my “appropriateness” that they did not get to light up my heart at all. I was stuck in the fear of repercussion and judgement and couldn’t let in the joy and the light and let them fill me up and source me, like they did on the day I bought them. 

Now this is quite a lot to distinguish and learn about myself in the early hours of a Saturday morning. Which is why I was completely taken out when at 9am, right as we were welcoming the new participants, one of the more experienced mentor coaches came up to me and told me that my dress was inappropriate. MY DRESS!! I was showing too much cleavage. WHAT!?!? My worst fear had just come true, but from a completely unanticipated direction. I managed to hold it together long enough to find a safety pin, and then lost it in the hallway and spent the next few hours crying in the hall while trying to work myself out.

One of my takeaways from this experience was that no matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I agonize and mold myself and do the “right” things, I simply can’t predict how some other person is going to react. It’s totally individual and it’s NOT ACTUALLY ABOUT ME.

Let me say that again. 

It’s NOT actually about ME. 

Each person has got their own individual reactions to specific components of the world around them. For my family, the leg-warmers were "too much". For the participant, the leg-warmers were awesome. For my colleague, she was uncomfortable with “too much” cleavage. She had the same scripts running in her brain, but on a different topic. What even IS “too much”? It’s an INDIVIDUAL INTERPRETATION based on nothing but each person’s prior experience and what they have been corrected about by well-meaning people. It is not a fact. There is no standardized scale of enough and too much. There’s no way to “win” and get it all right. It’s not actually about me. And it doesn’t mean that I’m an irresponsible person, or whatever adjective your brain wants to substitute in there. It’s just something that this one person this one time was uncomfortable with, because they got told in the past that they weren’t allowed to do it. Or they saw someone else being made fun of and marked it down in their mental rulebook: “Avoid that or else be ridiculed. Being that way is wrong.”

So back to the glitter coat. 

I came thisclose to giving it away. To listening to all of the fear-based programming and just letting it pass through my life because it was not appropriate for me to enjoy it. Luckily I forgot to bring it along to the event where I was going to give it to a friend. Instead it sat on the top of a stack just looking at me. The stack made its way to a box to be sorted and yesterday I pulled it out of the box and took a deep breath and ALLOWED it to fill up my heart again. I allowed my heart to have it’s true impulse for joy without letting my brain and that cautionary adult voice talk it down. I allowed my heart to be touched and to be heard and expressed. And I put the coat in with the rest of my active wardrobe. 

Today when I got dressed, there it was. Shiny, luminescent, joyful, expectant. I allowed myself to put it on. And I let the joy wash over me. I let myself be seen in it without apologizing. Then I realized that this actually really needed to be expressed and shared even further. So I took this picture and started a Facebook post. I thought it would be a paragraph. Over an hour later it turns out that there was a LOT more waiting to be shared. 

My hope is to touch some hearts, to share that you’re not alone, and to invite you to GIVE YOUR HEART PERMISSION TO LOVE WHAT IT LOVES. Give yourSELF permission to be fully expressed. It might make someone uncomfortable, and that doesn’t mean anything about you. Isn’t JOY worth it? Wouldn’t you rather have joy than the endless agony of trying to be appropriate for everyone else? From now on I’m going to do my best to let my heart choose what’s appropriate for me. Because, contrary to popular belief, it is a very personal choice. And you get to make it!!