Yesterday felt different. Nothing extraordinary happened. There was no big revelation, no dramatic moment, no sudden voice in my head announcing that everything had changed. I simply lived my day, and somewhere in the middle of it, without even noticing exactly when it happened, something shifted.

I left the house in the morning dressed like myself, and when I say like myself, I mean colour. A lot of colour. The kind of outfit that makes absolutely no attempt to disappear into London. A few people actually stopped me in the street to tell me they liked what I was wearing, which always feels strange because London is a city where people can walk past you while the apocalypse is happening behind your head and barely look up. So when complete strangers stop to say, “I love your outfit”, you notice.

Then I accidentally ended up in Trade, and obviously I came out with clothes. Five pieces for £17.50, which still feels slightly illegal: fuchsia satin trousers, purple and yellow trousers, a tiny pale-blue dress, a little square-shaped fuchsia mini dress and a white lace dress. Colour, texture, weird combinations, things I could play with, things that felt like me.

Later, I dyed my hair pink. Not one perfect, uniform shade of pink, because I didn’t want a Pantone colour dropped on my head. My hair was already made of different shades of blonde and darker pieces, so the colour grabbed differently everywhere: pink, fuchsia, lilac, lighter pieces, darker pieces. When I looked at it, I thought, there I am. I fucking love it.

I did my nails too: five different colours, covered in ridiculous little 3D things, Hello Kitty, Cinnamoroll, bows, ice creams and tiny chocolate bars. I even took my boring glasses and covered them in Sanrio characters because apparently I am physically incapable of allowing an object to remain plain.

I’ve realised recently that there is a word that describes me incredibly well: personalise. I personalise everything. I need to touch things and somehow make them mine: my clothes, my glasses, my hair, my nails, my home, my art, my music. I don’t think I have one aesthetic. I’m some strange mixture of punk, kawaii, DIY, childish, colourful, playful, queer, chaotic and whatever else I decide to throw in tomorrow. A pink fucking unicorn assembled from spare parts.

Yesterday, looking at myself with my new pink hair, I started thinking about that strange human habit of changing our hair when something in our lives is changing. Break-up hair, new-job hair, I’ve-survived-something hair, I’m-about-to-do-something-stupid hair, new-life hair. Of course changing your hair doesn’t change your life, but sometimes I think we change something on the outside because something on the inside has already started moving.

And maybe that’s what I was doing.

Later that day, I went back to work on my book. I’m writing about a relationship that changed me deeply, and the process is much more intense than I expected. I’m reconstructing months of my life through messages, voice notes, conversations, things I wrote at the time, things I thought and things I couldn’t understand while they were happening.

There is something incredibly strange about taking months of your life and placing them next to each other. When you’re living something, you experience it one day at a time. Something happens, then something beautiful happens, then something hurts, then everything seems fine again, then something else happens. You forgive, you hope, you adapt, you continue. From inside it, every moment feels separate.

But when you put months next to each other, suddenly you can see the shape. You can see the patterns. And fuck, I can see them now. The same cycles, again and again and again, repeating themselves in slightly different clothes.

Working on this book has forced me to look at the whole thing instead of individual memories. Not just the worst moments, and not just the beautiful ones either. The whole thing. And yesterday, after spending hours doing that, I realised something incredibly simple: I don’t want that life.

It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t revenge. It wasn’t even sadness. It was strangely quiet. I simply realised that I don’t want that life anymore.

And I think that might be what moving on actually feels like.

For a while, I thought moving on would mean not thinking about what happened anymore, not hurting, not grieving, not having difficult nights, being completely healed, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe moving on is simply the moment when the future becomes more interesting than the past.

Yesterday, my life felt interesting again. I ate food that made my body feel good. I bought ridiculous clothes. I made my hair pink. I covered myself in colour. I created. I wrote. I worked until midnight without even noticing the hours disappearing because I was completely inside what I was doing. Somewhere between all of those tiny, apparently insignificant things, I realised how much I want my life back.

Actually, no. That’s not quite right.

I don’t want my life back. I want my life forward.

There is something else I’ve realised recently: I don’t want to wait to live anymore. I have spent too much time in waiting rooms, waiting for things to happen, waiting for plans to become real, waiting for the right moment, waiting for someone else, waiting for “one day”. One day we’ll go there, one day we’ll do this, one day we’ll travel, one day we’ll have this adventure.

But I don’t want a life made of things I might do one day. I want to do them.

My body sometimes makes that more complicated. There are things I have to adapt, things I have to approach differently and days when I simply cannot do everything I want to do. That is real. But something else is real too: I do things. I find a way.

If I want to make something, I make it. If I want to write a book, I sit down and write it. If I want pink hair, I make my hair pink. If I want to turn a completely normal pair of glasses into an explosion of tiny Sanrio characters, apparently I do that too.

And after dreaming about Japan for fifteen years, I finally stopped saying, “One day I will go to Japan.”

I bought the fucking ticket. I’m going.

Maybe that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned. I don’t need to wait for my life to begin because it’s already happening.

Yesterday wasn’t a perfect day, and I’m not writing this from the other side of some magical finish line. There are still things I’m processing and there will probably still be shit days. Healing isn’t a before-and-after picture. But yesterday something changed, and I could feel it. I wasn’t spending the day waiting to feel better before allowing myself to live.

I was living.

Maybe grief doesn’t end with a bang. Maybe sometimes you simply wake up one morning, put on too many colours, buy five ridiculous pieces of clothing, dye your hair pink, cover your nails in tiny chocolate bars, work on the story of what happened to you, and somewhere along the way realise that you don’t live there anymore.

You understand what happened, you take what you need from it, you leave the rest behind and you keep walking.

I think I’m ready for that now.

It’s time to move on.

I have things I want to make, places I want to see, music I want to play, books I want to write, people I haven’t met yet and versions of myself I haven’t invented yet. I have a whole fucking life that I have absolutely no intention of spending in a waiting room.

Besides, the unicorn is busy living.