The Click

My mother had heels, and when she wasn't home I wore them. I was a little girl, years away from them ever fitting, which was never the point.

I'd put them on in her closet and walk the whole house. Down the hallway, across the kitchen, back again.

Click, click, click on the floor.

Nobody was watching, and I did it for hours.

I wasn't playing dress-up. I want to be clear about that, because that's what an adult would have called it. I was doing something serious.

That sound meant I was in charge. It meant I was making something. It was the first time I ever felt like myself out loud, and it came through my feet.

You had one of these. Everybody did. A cape. A bike going too fast down a hill. A microphone that was really a hairbrush. The clack of something you weren't supposed to be wearing. Some sound or feeling that meant you were the biggest version of you, back before you had any words for it.

That was the original. That was you, uninstructed.

It's still there. It just went quiet, because at some point being that loud in your own house stopped feeling free and started feeling like something you'd have to explain.

So here's a question for this morning. What's your click now?

Not necessarily a good outfit day. I mean the thing that makes you feel eight years old and enormous. A heel on a hard floor? A coat with weight to it? A color that makes the grocery store turn its head?

Find that. Then quit saving it.

PUT ON the piece that makes you feel like the kid in the hallway who knew exactly who she was. Walk around your own house in it before you go anywhere. That's the oldest, surest signal you've got

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