Unbothered.Unapologetic.In Pink.

I watched the Barbie movie for the sixth time today. Sixth. And no, I will not be taking questions. Or actually, maybe I will, because that number is precisely the point.

Here's the thing about me and Barbie: it was never just a toy. It was a whole entire world. Pink dream houses, tiny plastic heels that definitely weren't made for walking anywhere practical, and a woman who was literally an astronaut AND a president AND a veterinarian before most of us had decided on a favourite colour. Barbie didn't ask for permission. She just showed up, in her best outfit, and did the thing. Quietly revolutionary. Loudly pink. Both, always.

The movie came out and the world collectively lost its mind. Honestly, same. But what actually wrecked me, personally, was the part that didn't get as many hot takes: the moment Barbie chooses to be a real woman. With feelings and flat feet and mortality and all. Not because a man asked her to. Not because society cleared its throat and said it was time. But because she wanted to. Full stop. No footnotes.

That's the whole thing, isn't it? The wanting to. The audacity of giving yourself permission without waiting for someone else to grant it. I have spent an embarrassingly large portion of my thirties having to relearn this lesson in various forms, in various situations, from various people who thought they had opinions about my life. And every single time I rewatch this movie, I find some new corner of it that feels like it was written specifically for me and my complicated set up with conventional expectations.

I am a woman in her thirties. I have a full-time job. I live alone, which means I deal with rogue plumbing situations and grocery runs and the full psychological warfare of adulting with zero backup. I pay my bills on time. I have opinions about interest rates now. I did not ask for this by the way!

I also own approximately one thousand stickers (an exaggeration but you get the point). Watch Rugrats with the same dedication most people reserve for critically acclaimed prestige television. Will scroll past forty-seven perfectly acceptable versions of something in a neutral colour before I find it in pink, because pink is the destination and everything else is just a wrong turn. These are not contradictions. These are just facts about me, and I am very at peace with all of them.

People find this jarring sometimes. Like joy has an expiry date. Like the childlike wonder is supposed to quietly dissolve somewhere around the time you start filing taxes or attending work retreats where someone makes you do trust falls. I think what most people call "growing up" is just slowly bullying yourself out of the things that made you genuinely happy. And I will not be doing that. Not as a statement. Just as a personal commitment to being a person I actually like.

In Barbieland, everyone is exactly what they want to be, every single day, without having to justify it to a single soul. I live in the real world, with real consequences and genuinely terrible fluorescent lighting. But the spirit of it? The sheer nerve of being fully, unapologetically yourself? I am holding onto that with both hands like a pink velvet purse on a night out.

I love being a woman. I love it in the specific way that holds all the contradictions at once without flinching. The softness and the steel. The simplicity and the complexity. The pink everything and the deeply held convictions about what I do and do not want my life to look like. It is all in there, at the same time, and none of it cancels out the rest.

One of those convictions, and I will say this until I run out of breath: your womanhood does not come with a checklist. If you want marriage and babies and the whole traditional arc, beautiful, valid, entirely yours. If you want a career and solo travel and a one-bedroom apartment decorated entirely according to your own taste with zero compromises, also beautiful, also valid, also entirely yours. If you are still figuring it out, changing your mind, doing some version of all of the above at once, mixing and matching, that is just called being a person, and it is fine.

Society has a very specific, very boring vision of what a woman in her thirties is supposed to want. I find it funny, and only slightly exhausting, that simply existing outside of that vision gets read as a whole statement. It is not a statement. It is not a manifesto. It is just my life, which I have been designing with care and intention and a genuinely disproportionate number of pink things.

Gloria's monologue. You know the one. She says women are supposed to be everything and nothing at once, and it is impossible, and exhausting, and yet we do it anyway. The audience cried because it was accurate. Brutally, specifically, personally accurate.

But here is my addendum to Gloria, because she deserves a follow-up: you do not have to be everything to everyone. You have to be everything to you. The whole, weird, sticker-collecting, Spongebob-watching, pink-obsessed, bill-paying, boundary-setting, fully formed version of you. That is the Barbie that matters. Not the one the world sketched out for you. The one you actually are.

And no, this is not a Women's Day article. (It is also not not a Mother’s Day article, but I am choosing to file that under coincidence and keep it moving.)

The movie ends. The credits roll. I am sitting there on rewatch number six, surrounded by pink things, a fully grown adult woman who is also, simultaneously and without a single apology, a child at heart. Not a contradiction. Not a quirk. Just me, exactly as designed.

-Always in pink!