Qveen Herby Said What She Said
Qveen Herby once said “not for you, you unwhimsical bitch,” and I think about it more than I should. Her music isn’t always my cup of tea, but she’s a Taurus, and as a fellow Taurus I have nothing but respect for her talent, her beauty, and her absolute commitment to dopamine as a lifestyle. She gets it. And that line? That line lives in my head rent free.
People will tell you Taureans are boring. Stubborn, they say. Slow, they say. Set in their ways. Those people do not have a single close Taurus in their life, because we are the most whimsical sign in the entire zodiac and I will die on this hill in a very comfortable pair of slippers. We are the ones feeding birds in silk robes. We are the ones who make up songs in the middle of Coles. We are the ones who turn a Tuesday into an occasion because we refuse to let life be beige.
My life is genuinely whimsical and I’m not even being modest about it. I have a fluffy black cat who has more personality than an entire football team and significantly better hair. I feed the local magpies. I drink strawberry matcha and champagne, separately, obviously, because I’m whimsical not chaotic. I float. And if you’re reading this feeling like life has become a little too grey, a little too functional, a little too much like a spreadsheet you didn’t ask to be in, this is for you.
Start With the Birds and the Drinks
Go outside and find a bird. I’m serious. Find a bird, give it a name, give it a personality, give it a whole backstory. The magpie who visits my balcony is called Squinty, because she has a lopsided beak and she owns it completely. She sings for my attention. She flaps her wings with full-body excitement when she sees me coming. She’s married to Hoppy, they nest in the tree directly across from my balcony, and they’ve already brought one generation of babies to meet me, which I consider a formal introduction and an honour. I don’t make the rules. I just live this way. The moment you start assigning inner lives to the creatures around you, something shifts. You start noticing more. You start being present in a way that no wellness app has ever actually achieved.
This is Disney Princess behaviour and I’m encouraging it without reservation. You’re not too old for this. You’re not too cool. Talking to birds, smelling flowers you pass on the footpath, stopping to look at something beautiful for no reason other than it’s beautiful and taking a photo for preservation of that moment? That’s not childish. That’s the whole point. That’s the thing most adults quietly abandoned somewhere between their first mortgage stress and their third disappointing work meeting, and getting it back is worth more than any retreat you could book.
While you’re at it, drink the pretty drink. Not pretty as in Instagrammable, necessarily, though that’s a bonus. Pretty as in it gives you dopamine. As in it makes the ordinary moment feel slightly ceremonial. A hand whisked matcha. A caramel frappe. A sparkling water with lime in a glass that feels fancy. Not a Coke. Not a sad desk water. Something that makes you feel like you chose it. Because you did. And choosing small pleasures on purpose is how whimsy actually starts, one deliberate little decision at a time.
Dress Like You’re the Main Character (Because You Are)
Dopamine dressing is not a trend. It’s a philosophy. It’s the practice of putting on clothes because they make you feel something, not because they’re appropriate or sensible or what everyone else is wearing. It’s the yellow dress when you feel like sunshine. It’s the dramatic coat when you need armour. It’s the earrings that are too much for a Tuesday, worn on a Tuesday, because who decided Tuesday didn’t deserve them in the first place?
I’m not telling you to blow your budget or overhaul your wardrobe in one emotional afternoon. I’m telling you to look at what you own and ask, which of these actually makes me feel alive? Not which is most practical, not which photographs well, not which my mother would approve of. Which makes you feel like yourself, turned up slightly. Start there. Wear that. Notice what happens to the rest of your day when you’ve already made one decision that was entirely, unapologetically for you.
And if you see something on someone else that’s wonderful, tell them. Stop keeping compliments inside your head like they’re precious and limited. They’re not. They’re renewable. Walk up to the woman in the amazing dress and tell her it’s an amazing dress. Tell the person with the interesting shoes that their shoes are interesting. Complimenting a stranger costs you nothing but can absolutely make their entire week. It’s also a very whimsical thing to do. You become the bright moment in someone else’s day and that is a genuine power. Use it.
Put More Art in Your Life, Full Stop
You don’t need gallery walls and a curatorial vision. You need things on your walls that make you feel something. A print from a market. A painting from a thrift shop that has no business being that good for seven dollars. Something from Kmart that you liked and bought anyway without consulting anyone’s opinion. Art from Shein if that’s where you found it. It doesn’t need to match. It doesn’t need to tell a cohesive story about your aesthetic journey. It just needs to be there, existing in your space, making your eye land somewhere interesting.
We’ve been trained to think art has to be serious and considered and expensive, and that’s just not true. Art is anything that makes you pause. A poster. A photograph. A weird little ceramic you found at a car boot sale that you cannot explain but cannot stop looking at. Buy more of these things. Put them places. Let your home be a collection of things you’ve genuinely responded to rather than a Pinterest board that performs good taste for an imaginary audience.
Travel more, too, and I don’t mean internationally, though yes to that whenever possible. I mean cross the river. Go to the suburb you’ve never been to. Take the long way. Take the scenic route. Science actually backs this up, and I love when science confirms what I already suspected from vibes alone. Travel increases grey matter. New environments create new neural pathways. Your brain genuinely changes when you expose it to unfamiliar places. So the weekend drive somewhere slightly different, the bus to the neighbourhood you’ve never explored, the walk down the street you always pass but never turn into, these aren’t small things. They’re quietly expanding you.
Your Body Is Doing Something Miraculous
Dance more. Again, science. Dancing regulates your nervous system, and your nervous system, if you’re anything like me, is working overtime and could use the help. You don’t need a class. You don’t need to be good. You need a kitchen and a song and about forty five seconds of deciding you don’t care how you look. That’s it. That’s the whole practice. Lulu watches me do this and he is not impressed but he also hasn’t left, so I consider that a full endorsement.
Embrace your divine feminine, and not necessarily in the way the algorithm keeps trying to sell you. Not the crystal grid, the moon journal, the specific linen aesthetic, though listen, if that’s your thing, gorgeous, keep going. I mean something more fundamental. The fact that you are, quite literally, a portal. The fact that your body does things that would sound like science fiction if we weren’t just used to them. The rage, the tenderness, the intuition, the capacity to hold enormous things, that’s yours. It’s not a liability. It’s not something to manage or minimise. It’s the whole engine.
We’ve been taught to shrink the inconvenient parts of being a woman, and the convenient parts too, honestly, anything that takes up space or makes noise or doesn’t fit neatly. But whimsy, real whimsy, comes from being fully in your body and actually enjoying what it can do. The version of you that floats through life isn’t the one who’s checked out. She’s the one who’s completely, deliberately, unapologetically in it.
Whimsy Is Contagious. Start Spreading It.
The last thing about whimsy is that it doesn’t stay contained. You can’t actually start feeding Squinty the Magpie and drinking matcha and telling strangers their dress is beautiful without it trickling outward. The people around you notice. Some of them start doing it too. Someone sees you stop to smell a flower on the footpath and it gives them permission to do the same thing they’ve been too self-conscious to do. You become a small, low-key permission slip for everyone in your orbit.
This is how I think about it. Whimsy isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t have. It’s a practice. It’s a series of tiny decisions you make, repeatedly, to choose the interesting thing over the functional thing, the beautiful thing over the convenient thing, the alive thing over the automatic thing. You build it the same way you build any habit, through repetition, through showing up, through doing it even when it feels slightly ridiculous, especially when it feels slightly ridiculous.
So. Squinty is waiting. The pretty drink is a decision away. Your wardrobe contains at least one thing that deserves a Tuesday. Start there. Be slightly delusional about how magical your ordinary life is. Be the woman who names the birds and tips the nail lady and stops to say, I love your dress, to a stranger on the street. Unwhimsical is a choice. So is the alternative. Choose accordingly.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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