Last month, I realized my favorite color had changed. For years, I had always told people that my favorite color was green, specifically forest green. It was the color of my favorite childhood fairytales, stories of little winged women flitting through forests and sprinkling magic on the leaves. It was the color of the woods I hid out in when I was in high school, writing inklings of the poetry that would end up in my application to American University’s MFA program. It was the color of my undergraduate alma mater, where I found some of my dearest friends and learned just how much I loathed chemistry lab. Forest green had a history with me. It’s the color that looks best on me. But it’s not my favorite anymore.
Sometimes, I need to check in with myself. When the brain fog gets too thick, it’s hard to see myself anymore. So I make lists of my favorite things. It’s as silly as it sounds, writing out “this or that” and “my favorite food is…” like I’m filling out a Coke or Pepsi book on the playground. But there’s a reason those things exploded in popularity in the Olden Days of 2006: it’s fun to surround yourself with the things you like. So while sitting by myself at the Philz Coffee on 18th Street–which no longer exists–I looked up a prompt to list my favorite things. The first item, right at the top, was the most basic question: “What’s your favorite color?” Instead of automatically writing down “forest green” in my notebook, I took a minute to think about the question, and realized that my prepared answer was wrong.
I thought about all the little moments in my life recently where I got to choose the color of something, and recognized a pattern. The marker I always use on my refrigerator whiteboard is purple. The half-used bottle of hair dye in my bathroom cabinet is called “Purple Rain.” The art on my bedroom wall, the cat-shaped stress ball on my desk, the tarot card deck sitting on a repurposed end table are all in shades of violet, lavender, lilac. Even my character in my current Dungeons & Dragons campaign–a badass, half-elf fighter named Vesta–has purple hair. When given a choice, my instinct always drifts back to purple. Maybe, purple was actually my favorite color.
Realizing that something had changed about myself caused a shift in me. I don’t mean to sound like, to quote my lovely friend Sarah Grace, “I’m Sylvia Plath and I’m talking about colors!” I don’t think the shift from forest green to lavender implies that something cataclysmic occurred in my psyche, that the colors mean anything more than a difference in wavelength of light. But it forced me to confront the fact that multiple truths can exist at the same time. Forest green was once my favorite color, and now it’s lavender. The existence of one doesn’t prevent the existence of another. Change doesn’t mean that everything that came before was, actually, a lie. The purple flowers overtaking the field does not mean the grass was never green.
I think about the impact of small changes in my writing, too, how the compounding of change forges how I define myself as a writer. Today, I write poetry about a lot of heavy things: grief, worthiness, forgiveness. Tomorrow, I might write poetry about healing, or love, or the way the stars move across the sky. Tomorrow, I might write fiction instead; I might not write at all. But what I write tomorrow doesn’t make what I write today useless, and what I write today doesn’t make what I wrote yesterday worthless. Neither of these things make any of my writing any less authentically “me.” Whether I am writing with a green pen or a purple pen, or simply just holding a pen in my hands and staring at a page, I am still a writer. I am still myself. And all the versions of myself can exist side by side with each other.
Written by: Michelle Ott