I am a “purple girl”. It’s my color…not my only color, but the one I’m always attracted to first in any store, window, photo, the color that makes me feel happy, the color that would totally fill my closet and my house if I wasn’t careful about it (DH even let me buy a purple couch, how sweet is that).

Purple is loud. Purple says, “Look at me!” Purple can be dark or light, hard or soft, arrogant or shy. Ahhhhhhh, purple. Purple is passion. And you will find that people who love purple (unlike people who like other…let’s say…lesser colors) might be soft spoken in general, but are passionate about their color. I have found this to be the general rule with purple-lovers. It is indicative of their personality that they love this color. Ask a person who loves the color blue, for instance, and they will say, “blue.” No inflection, maybe even with a slight shrug. No, no, no…that just won’t do. Ask a purple person their favorite color, and they say enthusiastically, with a big cheesy grin and a gleam in their eye, “PURPLE!” Try it, you’ll see. Purple people are different, they just are.

This is an important fact that helps to define me. When I was young-er, insecure about my place in the world, not wanting to be obnoxious or stand out too much, if asked I would declare my favorite color to be green. Green is safe. Green is a little off-center of blue, enough to be slightly different, but not too much. Green doesn’t call attention to itself. [Don't get me wrong, all you people out there who love the color blue. I really like blue. As a matter of fact, as an artist, I love color. Period. But let's face it, everybody and their cousin picks blue as their favorite color. I just don't want to get any nasty comments about me being a blue-hater, a blue-phobe. I like blue, okay?]

Around the age of 40 (give or take a year), I studied a book called Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want(I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to find their “path”). This book has lots of exercises to help you figure out what you should be doing with your life, and one of them is discovering your favorite color. Well, it hit me like a ton of bricks that my ACTUAL favorite color was not green at all, but PURPLE! Loud, obnoxious purple. Suddenly, I understood myself better. An “ah-hah!” moment.

When the year 2001 was approaching, I wanted to do something to commemorate the occasion, something to ring in the new millennium for myself. I chose to wear purple for a full year. Something purple every single day…although you couldn’t always SEE it, I would be wearing it. It was pretty funny…when the kids at church heard that I was wearing purple every day, sometimes one would come up to me and ask, “Are you wearing purple today?” I would nod and smile, and they would look me up and down and say, “I don’t see any purple.” I would just say, “Believe me, I’m wearing purple…” My sister sent me little purple things several times that year…a coin purse, hair clips, socks…things that would help my quest. And I did it. I completed the quest. And I like it so much, I like the way it reminded me to just be myself and not try to hide my personality, that I continued it. Yessiree, I have been wearing purple every day for the last 8 years and counting. Maybe it’s silly and pointless, but you know what? I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it…because I’m a purple girl.