Stop Waiting for 'The Right Time'

The Shoes That Outlived a Pandemic

I have a pair of shoes I bought in February 2020. Just before the world tilted on its axis and we all became experts in banana bread and existential dread. I bought them imagining the summer I was going to have. The dinners, the rooftop drinks, the impossibly chic moment where I’d walk into a room and these shoes would do all the talking for me.

You know what happened next. Living in Scotland, I spent two years cycling through various flavours of lockdown. Hard lockdown, soft lockdown, the kind where you could see one person on a bench if you both pretended not to be cold. The shoes stayed in their box. There were a few dinners here and there, sure. But every single time I looked at them, I thought, not yet. Not this one. I’ll save them for something special.

Then I moved to Australia. New country, new wardrobe, new life. And somehow, against all logic, the same thing happened again. The shoes sat on the rack, gathering the kind of quiet dignity only unworn shoes have. Still waiting. Still being saved. Still pristine and pointless.

The Brunch That Broke the Spell

Last weekend I was getting ready to meet a friend for brunch. Standing in front of my shoe rack, doing that thing where you look at twelve pairs and feel personally betrayed by all of them. And then my eye landed on The Shoes. Still in their box. Still patiently waiting for an occasion that was apparently never going to qualify.

And I thought, why not? It’s brunch. It’s a Saturday. I’m a grown woman who bought these shoes with her own money five years ago and has worn them precisely zero times. If I die in a freak coconut accident next week, those shoes go to charity untouched, and some lucky stranger gets to live the life I was too precious to live myself. So I put them on. I wore them to brunch. And babe, it felt amazing.

Not because anyone noticed. Not because brunch suddenly became a magazine cover. But because for the first time in five years, the shoes were doing what shoes are for. They were on feet. They were walking. They were participating in my actual life instead of being a museum exhibit titled Things She Thought She Deserved One Day.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves About ‘Special’

We do this constantly. Saving the good candle, the nice perfume, the lipstick that costs more than dinner. Holding onto the gorgeous dress for the gorgeous event that never quite arrives. Keeping the expensive bottle for the celebration we have not yet earned. We have built entire emotional economies around the idea that joy must be rationed, and that everyday life is somehow not worthy of the things we already own.

The logic is so quietly destructive. We tell ourselves we are being responsible. Thoughtful. Restrained. We are not. We are postponing our own pleasure on the off chance that a more deserving version of ourselves shows up later. A version with better skin, a better job, a better dining room. A version who has earned the lipstick. As though the current you, the one reading this in possibly questionable pyjamas, is somehow a rough draft.

Here’s the punchline. There is no future self walking down a marble staircase ready to receive these special moments. There is only you, on a Tuesday, eating cereal over the sink. And honey, that Tuesday is your life. That cereal is your life. The pretty bowl you bought and never use because it might chip? Get it down. Eat the cereal out of it. Live in your own house.

Later Is a Trick

Later sounds reasonable. Later sounds responsible. Later sounds like a thoughtful adult making considered decisions. But later is sneaky. Later has no actual address. Later is the version of yourself you are forever chasing but never quite become. Later is how perfectly good shoes spend half a decade in a box while you wear the same scuffed pair to brunch every single weekend.

And the cruel thing about later is how often it just becomes never. The trip we keep meaning to plan. The café we keep meaning to try. The friend we keep meaning to call. The good underwear we keep meaning to wear on a day that feels significant. We are not protecting these things from being wasted. We are wasting them through preservation, which is honestly worse, because at least if you used them you got something out of it.

I’m not saying live every day like it’s your last. That sounds exhausting and also slightly unhinged. I’m saying live every day like it’s your actual life. Because it is. The right time isn’t waiting around the corner with a clipboard, ready to grant you permission. The right time is the time you decide to take.

Wear the Shoes, Babe

You don’t need a milestone to enjoy the things you already own. You don’t need to lose weight to wear the dress. You don’t need a promotion to open the wine. You don’t need a date to put on the lipstick. You don’t need a destination to take the nice handbag. You are allowed to enjoy your own beautiful things while you are alive to enjoy them, which last time I checked, is now.

So have a look around your house this week. Find the thing you’ve been saving. The candle you won’t burn. The perfume you spritz once a year. The shoes still nestled in their original tissue paper like they’re waiting for a coronation. Pick one. Use it. Wear it. Burn it. Drink it. Eat off it. Let it leave your home as something other than a museum piece you eventually donate to a stranger.

Life isn’t something that starts when everything finally clicks into place. It’s already happening. Right now, in this very ordinary moment, while you’re reading this with one leg curled under you and Lulu’s equivalent biting your ankle. The right time is a fiction we use to delay our own joy. Stop falling for it. Wear the shoes to brunch. Wear them to the supermarket. Wear them to take the bins out if you want to. They are yours. This life is yours. Use it.

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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