What Was Always Yours

Somewhere in the basement of your memory, there's a girl who knew.

She's six, seven, eight, depending on the year you're remembering. She's wearing what she chose because choosing made her happy. Maybe the dress with the small flowers. Maybe her mother's high heels, three sizes too big, in front of the hallway mirror. Maybe roller skates going in circles in the basement on a rainy afternoon.

She's twirling. She's lip-syncing into a hairbrush like the show is sold out. She's putting on her grandmother's necklace and feeling, in her body, that she is magnificent.

Nobody had taught her yet that she wasn't.

You know my version of her. She was on the bedroom floor, dressing Barbie for her dreams. That floor was my empire. Yours had one too, wherever it was.

This is what was always yours. The eye that knew what made her happy. The body that moved toward what felt right. The certainty, before anyone talked her out of it, that she had every right to be the most fully expressed woman in the room.

She's been there the whole time. You just stopped hearing her.

And here's the part I love about all of this. She's still in motion. Still in the flowered dress. Still going in circles because circles felt good.

When you reach for the piece that delights you, you're claiming what's hers. Her eye. Her instinct. Her conviction that joy is a perfectly good reason to put something on your body.

Ask yourself what that girl already knows about you, before the world weighed in?

PUT ON the piece she would have reached for. She's been waiting a long time to get dressed with you again.