Where Does Your Sparkle Go?
Growing Up and Growing Out
I tell people that New York is a precious city to me, which is like saying pizza or the Eiffel Tower is precious to me. New York isn’t a mysterious, coveted entity, available only to me. It’s not some priceless fabergé egg passed down by my great-grandmother. But it does somehow feel precious, a place that manages to yield individual romance and sentiment, while being known to many as one of the epicenters of American industry and tourism: finance, tech, media, fashion, entertainment, nostalgia. A walking billboard for all that’s exciting and scary about this country.
It was the first city I lived in after graduating college, the first place I lived outside the place where I grew up. Nearly 3,000 miles from my hometown in Washington State, New York was a pipe dream that I never thought I could realize. No one in my immediate family circle had lived that far away, or even further east than Idaho. I had no connections and no courage to utter the ambition out loud. My only hope as a teenager was New York University, which I got rejected from, and wouldn’t have been able to stomach the cost of anyway. But somehow, it ended up coming together - a job with an office in the city, a partner who was willing to take the leap with me, fear and discouragement from myself and others that I managed to muscle through. When the wheels of the plane finally touched down, it felt like shackles being unlocked. I could do it, I was doing it.
I’ve always operated in this odd grey area of ambition; I am aware that I am a smart, capable, and even talented person, but I tend to have very low expectations regarding what I can actually accomplish. I find comfort in short-term goals. I’m getting better at resisting it, but I tend to put my head down and focus on getting through the immediate day or week, instead of staring out at the vast expanse in front of me and trying to make sense of it. When you grow up operating on shaky ground, rarely feeling a sense of control, your goals have no choice but to exist in the short term. You learn that the world spins without your permission and start to see how bad luck is doled out indiscriminately. All I cared about was finding solid ground where I could plant my two feet and getting through the next semester, which I managed to do swimmingly. The learned helplessness didn’t fade though. I never thought about life after stability.
When you have no expectations for yourself, small wins feel monumental. A job where I was getting paid any money at all. A roof over my head. People who can stand spending time with me. I felt like I won the lottery. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailedness took hold of me those first six months in New York, but something in my gut told me it wouldn’t last. Even at the height of my gratitude, with the colors fully saturated, I could see the bright lights beginning to dim slowly. I would get used to this. I would want more or I would want different. I chose to ignore the feeling and see how far I could let these wins carry me, like stretching food rations over a few more weeks than I should. I was a hang glider adrift. A pessimist in sheep’s clothing.
Last week, I paid New York a visit for the first time since I moved back to the West Coast. Three years ago, I moved to the city in the summer and was greeted by sweltering, damp heat, the acrid smell of garbage on the street, and a broken air conditioning unit. This year, I visited in November, on the precipice of full-blown winter. I packed all the thick coats that I have no use for in Los Angeles, but found no use for them in New York either. It was still squarely autumn, with orange leaves hanging by their threads and the air not cold enough to crack your hands. I wore the coats anyways. When else was I going to?
I traveled to New York with several Angelenos and felt the intense need to convince them of my fluency in the city. When someone asked, rhetorically, how we would get somewhere, I tripped over my words giving subway directions. I jay walked with assuredness. I reminisced on old restaurants and cafes, some of which had closed within the year. I played a convincing performance of someone with full competence in a city that has continued chugging and changing without me in it. A city that would continue to change without me there.
When I was on TikTok, which was also three years ago, I received a lot of videos of women claiming to have “lost their sparkle” or “lost their spark,” followed by them providing tips on how to “get your sparkle back.” In the “before” clips in these videos, the women were often crying in front of the camera, makeup-less, heartbroken, and burned out. And in the “after” clips, they were made up, smiling, twirling on the pavement - sparkle restored.
The “sparkle” refers to a kind of hopefulness and zest for life, which manifests in subtle ways physically - a twinkle in the eye, a casual upturn of the mouth. The sparkle dwindles when one experiences a rough patch: heartbreak, grief, failure. It returns when one gets out of their funk, breaking the habit of their bad disposition. In some of these TikToks, women claim to have recorded the exact moment their sparkle returned, which happens to be right when they pressed record on the front-facing camera with a full face of makeup and excellent lighting. Their hands clasp over their mouths - they’re so back. Optimism and excitement for the future retrieved like a planet completing its orbit.
In some cases, the “before” clip is of a teenage girl, eyes bright, smiling wide at the camera in the crowd of a high school football game. The “after” clip is of a frowning, seemingly-weathered twenty- or thirty-something woman, typing away in her cubicle. The sparkle, in this case, was lost as a result of aging. That elastic sense of hope embedded in a teenage girl with a supportive community, squashed by the reality of bills and a forty-hour work week.
As with many online discussions, this “sparkle” discourse exists in terms of absolutes. The sparkle is something you have or you don’t have. Once restored, it’s implied that the sparkle will endure with some permanence. Hardship is experienced in even doses, with a reasonable number of months or years between woes, allowing time for it to fade in and out of view at a linear rate. The sparkle is also something that lives on your skin - a shining light and sense of buoyancy that radiates out of you like a shooting star. Confidence is captured in photos, and is thus another thing to look for when analyzing a slew of Instagram hopefuls. Is my smile strained? Is there a light behind my eyes? Does my lust for life come through? Am I okay?
In New York, after dinner one night, I found myself at a bar, talking to a girl three years my junior - the age I was when I moved to the city. I keep forgetting that adults can technically be younger than me. We had a fairly surface-level conversation about career and lifestyle. Every word out of her mouth was impassioned, hands gesturing, eyes wide open. She spoke about her passion for ad tech and how she’s in a perpetual state of maintaining her weight, favoring ground turkey, starch, and lower-body workouts during the workweek. She told me she hates ground turkey, and I suggested she change up the seasoning to make it more interesting. She nodded. Her sparkle remained intact through it all, like a tightly wound spring.
I tried to steer the conversation away from work, as I tend to do, but couldn’t find a good segue. She clearly felt most comfortable speaking to me in corporate tongue, her eyes twinkling. My own flame was visibly extinguished. I excused myself to the bathroom, a graffiti-clad coat closet with a dirty commode and a tiny mirror. I looked in the mirror. If I were Jake Gyllenhaal, I would have punched the glass, and if I were Margot Robbie, I would have cried while reapplying my makeup.
As I looked in the mirror, it was hard not to characterize myself as someone who’s lost her sparkle. Walking around a city that I hold dear, but no longer know. Chatting with an ingenue who lights up at the mention of Excel shortcuts, a younger me in many ways. But I know that life is a series of losing and regaining your enthusiasm for things old and new. Certain things that used to sustain me simply can’t anymore. What lit me up at twenty-two - corporate participation, aligning with a popular in-group, and so on - doesn’t at twenty-five. It can be quite clarifying to feel your toes begin to curl at the front of your shoes and know that it’s time to get new ones. Time to move on. I think, as I often do, about Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” and some lyrics I love in Eliza McLamb’s song “Getting Free.”“Isn’t much but it’s always enough to know / I’m always on my way to wherever I go.”
One’s sparkle can’t shine with the same vivacity forever. Rayne Fisher-Quann shared a great quote from Gillian Rose in her latest essay, “Crisis of faith”: “keep your mind in hell and despair not.” If you refuse to address the muck and continue to spend your time searching, aloofly, for the light in your eyes in the photos, that light is destined to dwindle. When that extinguishment comes about, you have to look at it dead on and perhaps look ahead at the dreaded bigger picture. You have to know when it’s time to carry on. What a relief to know that there are always bigger fish to fry. And that we grow into our appetite for them.
I left the bar with a sense of relief and left New York with a tinge in my heart, but more room in my shoes. I wonder if ground turkey and starch will be enough to sustain that girl. I’m sure she’ll know soon enough.
This reminded me so much of Goodbye to All That! You knew when it was time to leave New York! And I'm dying that the video of the girl getting her sparkle back on camera has 220k views. What has the world come to.
Felt all of that. <3