“Be whatever you want to be, as long as you’re outrageous”.
This was included in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s thank-you speech after winning her BAFTA. Her Mom said this to her at one point in her life…
I wonder what it was like hearing that as a young girl, and what life would have been like had I heard that while growing up.
That’s not to say that I regret my childhood, but I can help thinking about what my younger self would feel hearing those words, being pushed to think I could be outrageous. There’s something about that word, ‘outrageous’, that feels like permission to fully embrace who I truly am instead of moulding to expectations, social norms or learnt behaviours.
Maybe I’m limiting myself by wishing I had heard these words when I was younger, because if I let them, they can have as much of an impact on me now as at any other time.
It feels like it’s time to let myself be outrageous and courageous. For some reason, parts of me needed permission to step into this.
The beautiful thing about permission is that we can give it to ourselves right now.
Perhaps that’s the most outrageous act of all – deciding that we no longer need to wait for someone else to tell us it’s okay to be fully, wildly ourselves.
The words that shape us don’t have to come from our past; sometimes they arrive exactly when we’re ready to hear them, calling us toward a future we’ve always been meant to inhabit.
What would it look like if, starting today, I embraced being outrageous? Not as a performance, but as a commitment to the most authentic version of myself?
