By Alexandra Lenihan
When I turned 27, I made a pact with myself.
I decided that while I was 27, I was only allowed to wear red nail polish. If I ran out of red nail polish or I got sick of red nail polish, I had to wear either clear nail polish or no nail polish. If I wanted to wear pink or blue or sparkles, I would have to wait until I was 28. What a thrilling adventure!
At that time, my life was kind of a shit show. Pretty much everything I’d ever identified with was shifting under my feet. My father had just died, I lived 3000 miles away from my family, I was falling in love and coming out of the closet, and I was contemplating whether the career I’d been pining for since I was 12 was what I *actually wanted.*
You guys know those phases when you’re like, “Yes, I’d love to listen to a podcast where one celebrity talks to another celebrity about their morning routine grounds them! I’d love to listen to 50!” That’s where I was. Looking for clues on how to make my life stable, while also becoming glamorous, and worthy of being interviewed. Looking for a roadmap on how to become who I was meant to be. That is when I discovered who that person was. Her name is Olive Parker.
“Who is Olive Parker?”, you might be thinking. The truth is, you already know, and yet… you don’t.
Olive Parker is a magazine writer/photographer/painter/activist. She’s beautiful but always a little disheveled. She always just got married, bought a house, and published her second memoir (“This one feels so much more me, right down to the cover!”) She gets paid to write feminist essays for Refinery29, and she’s working on a collaborative docu-series with Netflix about… something. She is inexplicably connected and unexpectedly casual (“I looked around at this Oscar’s afterparty and thought, where the hell is the bar?’ ”) She reveals during her interview (yes, she’s being interviewed, on a podcast, right now, somewhere) that she has an undergraduate literature degree from Sarah Lawrence, where she minored in poetry and interpretive dance. She made the dress she’s wearing, but she doesn’t sew much anymore (“I’ve got my hands in so many delicious projects right now! Something had to take a back seat!”) She is from “the Boston area,” but she was born in the Netherlands, and she only wears red nail polish.
Ok, fine. She’s not a real person. She’s the amalgamation that my brain created in response to people like her I see online. Still, real or imagined, Olive Parker had the life I was meant for, and red nail polish was going to take my life and make it hers. Red nail polish was going to turn me into her. In doing so, red nail poish was going to solve my problems, reveal my goals, revive my confidence, and make my life make sense again.
I started using my time wondering what Olive would do, what she would wear, what her quick retort would be, and, above all, how I could eat her and replace her. I would move into her house, marry her partner, write her third book and suck down all her organic grapes. What a dream. My future was now!
Flash forward to: now. I’m 28 and change. Did I become Olive Parker? Did my red nail polish serve as a magical portal into the kind of life for which only Gwenyth Paltrow would dare to dream?
No.
The results: I got tired of red, then tired of nail polish. Then my cuticles went to shit. What a thrilling adventure.
I don’t want to, like, mansplain this to you guys, because it probably seems super duper obvious to you, so think of the rest of this essay as me explaining this to.. Me.
I honestly thought that wearing only red nail polish was going to change my life. I guess I thought that it would make me feel powerful. Or.. business-y. Or rich or successful or like Emma Watson. And then if I felt that way, I thought I’d actually do things that a rich, successful, Emma-Watson-y person would do.
But, I didn’t. I didn’t all of a sudden become a person who makes different decisions. I didn’t learn the rules of magazine writing by osmosis and I didn’t magically become successful because I decided to feel like a successful (read: financially stable) person. I, instead, kept doing things the way I normally did them because I hadn’t actually tried to learn anything new. I hadn’t set any new goals, read any new books, or even googled “how do I write for a magazine.” What I had done was change my nail color.
Sure, now, I see the lack of logic. I do! I’m reading this essay too! Heck, I’m writing it! I see it, and I see you seeing it. But I’m not embarrassed. Because, who among us has never thought that feeling like someone else can turn us into someone else? Is it so crazy that I fell for the quick, easily marketable, beautifully Instagrammable idea that “this random small thing will drastically change your life I mean look at what it did for Reese Witherspoon!”? Weren’t we told that if we just believed in ourselves, we could do anything, be anyone, turn into Olive Parker, wear her vintage cowboy boots and steal her Anthropologie coffee mugs?
It took wearing red nail polish for a year for me to realize that there would need to be more involved. Chalk it up to a failed experiment at best, a rude awakening at worst.
Next time, I’m going to try something more drastic. Something that has at least 10 steps, and rules that are anything but arbitrary.
(Because I already tried the “drastic haircut” thing, and that didn’t really work either.)
Alexandra Lenihan just illustrated THIS BOOK. It contains over 70 drawings by her, and over 150 poems by Grant Chemidlin. She thinks you should check it out. She is also the owner and creator of len.10.10, the editor-in-chief of this blog, and the person who draws all the cartoons.