Today was my first day at my new gym. I’m changing a lot of things in my life at the moment, and I have to say, I like it. I know change scares a lot of people, and of course there are changes that are difficult, especially when they involve letting go of something we are attached to. Actually, attachment is a whole other subject, and something Buddhism taught me a lot about, but that probably deserves a post of its own.

In general, though, I like stepping outside my comfort zone. I like the feeling of doing something I haven’t done before, going somewhere I don’t know, changing a routine and seeing what happens. So this morning I was genuinely excited. New gym, new area of London, new little adventure.

And apparently I decided to celebrate the occasion by leaving the house looking like a walking rainbow. I had my new purple and yellow tracksuit, a pink and fuchsia cardigan, a multicoloured T-shirt, and my new ridiculously kawaii glasses covered in Sanrio characters. There was absolutely no attempt at moderation happening anywhere on my body.

I put my headphones on, started walking, and Spotify was on shuffle. Then Manifesto by Bandabardò started playing. I’ve known this song for years, but somehow this morning, dressed like that and walking towards another new thing in my life, I listened to it differently. Manifesto is essentially a celebration of individual freedom, of being outside the chorus, of refusing conformity and allowing yourself to exist as yourself instead of becoming another perfectly coordinated voice in a song written by somebody else.

And while I was listening, I started thinking about the last few weeks. Because something has changed in me. I have always been colourful. This isn’t a story about someone who spent her life wearing beige and suddenly discovered fuchsia. I have always liked strange clothes, colours, unusual combinations and things that probably make considerably more sense inside my head than they do on a hanger.

But apparently, somewhere inside me, there was still about 1% of restraint left. That 1% has now gone to hell. And I don’t think it happened for one single reason.

For a while, I had felt surrounded by grey. Not literal grey. The kind of grey that slowly gets into your life when something is draining you. I needed colour again. I needed to see it around me and on me. So the colours became brighter. My hair became pink. My clothes became louder.

But there was something else happening too. After months of being criticised, of feeling as though there was always something about me that needed changing, correcting or improving, I think something inside me eventually rebelled. Why the fuck am I limiting myself? Why?

If I want to wear yellow with purple and pink and fuchsia, why should I remove one of them? If I want pink hair, why shouldn’t I have pink hair? If I want to walk around wearing Hello Kitty and Sanrio characters as a grown woman, what exactly is the problem?

At some point I simply got tired of editing myself. I didn’t suddenly become colourful. I’ve always been colourful. I just stopped rationing it. And then something funny started happening.

The first day I went out dressed completely as I wanted, including a pair of ochre-yellow tights, a man stopped me in the street. Not just a passing glance or a smile. He actually stopped to tell me that he liked the way I was dressed and that all those colours put him in a good mood.

This is London. People here can be extraordinarily committed to pretending that nobody else exists, so having a complete stranger stop me simply to say something nice felt surprisingly unusual.

A few days later, while I was walking towards the National Gallery, a woman coming from the opposite direction looked at me, smiled, gestured at my entire outfit from top to bottom and gave me an approving “So cool!”.

Then another girl stopped me because of my bright pink Hello Kitty backpack. “Oh my God, your Hello Kitty backpack!” She loved it.

And then came my favourite one. I was walking down the street, once again dressed in an explosion of colours, when I passed a man who seemed to be in an extremely cheerful mood. He looked at me and suddenly shouted: “I saw a rainbow! I saw a rainbow!” I couldn’t stop laughing.

And this morning, walking towards my new gym dressed like that while Manifesto played in my headphones, all these little moments came back to me. Because the strange thing is that I never started dressing this way to make anybody else smile. I did it because I needed colour.

I needed to get rid of some grey. I needed to stop looking at myself as something that constantly required adjustment. I needed to stop asking whether I was too much and start asking a much simpler question: Too much for whom?

Maybe tomorrow I’ll wear fewer colours. Maybe I’ll wear more. Maybe in six months I’ll decide that I want to dress entirely in black. That’s the point. It isn’t really about colour. It’s about giving myself permission to change, to experiment, to be ridiculous, to be loud, to be quiet, to change my mind and to take up exactly as much space as I happen to take up that day.

This morning I was walking towards something new, listening to a song about refusing to become just another voice in the chorus, dressed like a rainbow. And I realised I wasn’t trying to become more myself. I had simply stopped turning myself down.