When did I lose my sparkle?

“I’m just not going to worry about what I’m wearing.”

The party had a dress code, and I could feel myself spiraling about what to wear, getting overwhelmed, and spending yet another Saturday night alone on the couch in sweatpants watching Love Island.

The party invitation said “Wear your best celestial attire!” What the fuck is celestial attire? I made a deal with myself not to overthink it, so instead I showed up looking like I had just ascended from the Underworld, in a modest black turtleneck sweater, black micro-shorts, black tights, and black boots.

I walked in and immediately regretted not trying harder. But It’s fine! I told myself. Going to the party is the point. Getting out of my isolated cocoon is the point. The dress code is not the point, I told myself.

But on the dance floor, I felt very differently. I watched other women trickle into the party wearing sexier, sparklier outfits, and I started to wonder when I stopped doing that too. I used to be the shiny one at the party. Now, I felt like a dark rain cloud.

I saw myself hiding in plain sight.

My friend and I ducked into her bedroom to paint sparkles on my face. It helped, but I couldn’t shake the mystery of where had I gone in the last few years? Why didn’t I even want to try to pull myself together? When did everything start feeling like survival mode?

Jack, I want you to draw me like one your Sad Clown Girls.

I used to show up to the party bright, comfortable, confident, shiny… but that was before the Terrible Things that happened.

We all have them. My recent ones made me vacate the premises of my own body. My body stopped feeling like a safe place to be, and so I abandoned it. And there’s really no point in decorating a home you hardly spend any time in.

When we experience Terrible Things, many of us try to bypass or shove them down. I did… until I couldn’t anymore. The Terrible Things that happened in the last 7 years made me believe it would be safer to turn off my light than continue to shine brightly. Standing out felt dangerous. Many times over the last few years, I have wondered when I stopped smiling fully in pictures.

Where did I go?

Welcome to The Brilliance Experiment

A diamond — or any gemstone for that matter — starts as a cloudy, tarnished, unassuming rock. But when it’s cleaned, cut, and given attention, it transforms from a rock to a prized possession. The more facets a diamond has, the sparklier it will be.

I know I’m not the only person who feels duller and more isolated since the Pandemic sent us indoors, behind our Zoom calls and iPhones. I often think about the theory that the Internet is flattening culture, and it makes me wonder how flat we will become as a result if we don’t intervene?

I don’t want to be flat. I want the facets! I want the brilliance! But it’s going to take work and patience.

Photo by Tahlia Doyle on Unsplash

What will follow in this series are weekly experiments to polish the facets of myself that have become dull and flat, and to carve and polish new ones.

There are 45 more weeks in this year, so if you upgrade your subscription ($5/mo or $60/year), you’ll receive 45 small, simple challenges over the remainder of 2025, all intended to expand and — I hope— inspire many of you who feel lost and stuck right now, just like me.

We’ll have a group chat running for the paid subscribers so I can share my experiments, we can all yap, and hopefully I can get you to join in and try them too!

Week 1: Color Theory

My first challenge in the Brilliance Experiment is inspired by my experience at that party — wear more color.

I wear black 80% of the time, and in the coming week, I’ll be working around the black attire and making different choices. I truly have no idea what I’m going to wear for a whole week and I already anticipate some huge challenges around this. But, we move anyway.

I have gone full Steve Jobs with my black attire. Mostly, I don’t want to think about what I’m wearing if I’m sitting at home alone on my laptop all day. All black is easy, and sometimes that’s exactly what my ADHD mind needs to avoid making yet another decision, but I also wonder if it’s survival mode thinking. And perhaps this is exactly the problem.

💎 NEXT WEEK I’m dressing myself more brilliantly in colors just to see what happens. I will report back! Who wants to join me?

Day 1! Already so confused about how to dress myself.

I don’t know where this journey will go, but I do know that there are a lot of people who feel like they’ve lost themselves inside of some kind of darkness, and I want to explore how to recover our brilliance again, in spite of the Terrible Things.

When all the girlies on Instagram are telling you to fEeL yOuR fEeLiNgS, but you’re sitting here spiraling about what to make for lunch because you couldn’t even feel that you were hungry 20 minutes ago, this all feels like a big mess. It’s survival mode.

But, you have 80% more information coming from your body to your brain, than from your brain to your body, so this is why you can’t think your way into feeling differently. You have to experience how something feels first.

And the Brilliance Experiment is a year-long exploration into feeling and feeling differently.

Your nervous system learns through experiences, not reading another self-help book. And, regrettably, you can’t think your way to a new nervous system. So, I hope you’ll join me on this grand, uncharted exploration into that great unknown of feeling better.