What it means to sparkle

Inspired by a conversation with a concerned friend yesterday and my attempt to explain my life out loud to someone new last night, I’ve been thinking about what I actually mean when I say I’m getting my sparkle back.

The honest answer is, I don’t think I’ve had much of a second.

Not in some poetic, exaggerated way...just literally. A stretch of time where I wasn’t immediately becoming something else. A new city. A new relationship. A new job. A new version of myself, I was trying to step into before I’d fully processed the last one.

From 2019 to now, everything has been in motion. Even the good things. There was always something next, something unfolding, something I was adapting to in real time.

I think my sparkle first showed up in January 2020 when I moved to DC for my internship. It felt new, a little unsteady, but alive in a way that still feels memorable, like I was finally free, finally an adult stepping into whatever version of myself I wanted to become that week.

And then COVID hit a few months later. Everything collapsed into this pause where nothing was moving, but nothing was fully settled either. My sparkle was there, but it hadn’t fully had a chance to catch the light.

It came back when I moved to Denver for school. That version of me was louder. More chaotic. Less careful. I was trying to find myself in every direction at once—snowboarding, friendships, boys, a semblance of a career path beginning to show itself, a sense of belonging within reach for once. It felt like I was finally stepping into something, even if I didn’t know what it was yet.

Then life shifted again. I hurt my knee. Stopped running. Put all my energy into snowboarding. Things got faster, messier, and more scattered. Around that same time, my dad lost his job, while I was in Utah for the first time in April 2021. He had been helping support me through school and housing my entire adult life up to that point. Finding that out while I was away still feels like one of those moments where everything splits in two.

My mom tried to convince me I’d need to move home. That wasn’t even something I could compute. So I didn’t. I stayed in motion. I figured it out. I got a job at Woodward through people I met that weekend in Utah. And I just…kept going.

That’s kind of the pattern I can see now. I kept moving before I had time to sit with anything fully. And somewhere along the way, I started confusing motion with clarity.

Relationships fell into that pattern, too. Each one felt like it could be the thing that finally grounded everything else. A place where I could arrive and stay. I think I kept thinking: if I just choose right, everything else will settle.

But I was never settled inside myself when I was making those choices. I mean, how could I? I’d never given myself the chance to.

That version of me was always chasing forward motion. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been addicted to momentum, because it felt like proof that I was getting it right. But in reality, I was just running from feeling; from experiencing anything fully. I can see now how often I entered things before I actually understood what I needed from them, or from myself.

Looking back, I don’t think I was lost. I think I was just never still long enough to hear myself clearly over everything I was building.

The word “sparkle” has become shorthand for something I didn’t always have language for at the time. It’s not about becoming someone new. It’s more like realizing there was something in me that was always there, but constantly being reflected off motion instead of light. Off noise instead of stillness.

A lot of what I’ve learned about love and relationships has come from experience rather than example. I didn’t grow up seeing what steady, reciprocal love looked like in practice, so I learned it by living inside versions of it, trying to figure out what felt right and what didn’t, sometimes only realizing the difference in hindsight.

And I try to give myself grace for that, because everyone is working with what they were given. Including me.

But I also had to start noticing where I disappeared in the process. Where I became smaller, or more adaptable, or more focused on keeping things going than on asking whether they were actually right for me.

Nothing about it feels wasted. It just feels fast. Too fast to integrate while it was happening.

Now, when I talk about getting my sparkle back, I don’t mean finding something I lost. I mean, finally having enough space to see what was already there without it being drowned out by everything else I was rushing toward.

I’ve always had a personality, opinions, beliefs, love, and hobbies. None of this is about changing who I am. Finding my sparkle is letting those parts of me catch the light. It’s about giving myself space to breathe, to take it all in, and to step into the sunlight.

To truly sparkle.