Care Bears – x Wicked 2-Pack
There are mornings I wake up soft. Like I want to hug the whole world back to safety. The light through the blinds feels forgiving, my coffee tastes hopeful, and I tell myself—today, I’ll be kind. I’ll smile at strangers. I’ll answer every text. I’ll smooth the edges. Be light, be warm, be easy.
And then there are the other mornings. The ones where I roll over and feel the weight of everything I’ve tried to carry gracefully, pressing into my ribs. The ones where I don’t want to fix anything. I don’t want to perform okay-ness. I want to growl. Or hide. Or tell the truth out loud, even if it doesn’t sound polite.
I used to think one version of me was right and the other was a problem. That my Glinda days—those pink, hopeful, do-no-harm days—were the “real” me. And that the Elphaba days, the ones where my edges showed, were something to manage. To clean up. To apologize for.
But it’s not that simple, is it?
Because even when I’m glowing, there’s a flicker of defiance underneath. And even when I’m rough and burnt out, there’s a small softness trying to make its way back to the surface.
It’s strange how we’re taught to distrust the parts of us that don’t fit the script. The angry, messy, un-“cute” feelings. The refusal to smile when it isn’t earned. The voice that says, “Actually, that hurt me.”
I used to shove those down, thinking they made me unlovable. Thinking love meant never being too much of anything—never too emotional, too opinionated, too tired, too honest.
But Elphaba doesn’t apologize for being too much. She just is. Green skin and all.
And Glinda—she sparkles, but she’s not shallow. Her light doesn’t erase pain; it refracts through it.
Somewhere along the way, I realized both of them live in me. Maybe in you, too.
There’s a certain exhaustion that comes with being “the nice one.” The fixer. The peacemaker. You become fluent in reading everyone else’s temperature before checking your own. You know when to smile, when to soften your tone, when to make yourself smaller so someone else feels big enough.
It’s a skill, really. But it costs something.
I remember once, someone said to me, “You’re always so calm.” It was meant as a compliment. But I felt this tiny ache behind my ribs, because what they didn’t see was how much effort it took to look calm. To keep the storm inside from showing.
That’s the day I started listening to my Elphaba.
The one who says, “You don’t have to be nice to be good.”
The one who’s willing to be misunderstood if it means being real.
The one who knows that saying no is a kind of love, too.
And honestly? She saved me.
Because there’s a different kind of beauty in grit. The beauty of someone who’s learned that softness without boundaries becomes self-erasure. That not every moment needs to be smoothed over. That love, real love, can survive the sound of truth spoken out loud.
Still, I miss Glinda when she’s gone. The way she makes the world feel a little less cruel. The way she believes in transformation—how even heartbreak can shimmer if you turn it the right way.
Sometimes I worry she won’t come back.
But she always does.
Usually in small ways—when I buy flowers for no reason, or text someone just to say I love them, or laugh at something so dumb it breaks the tension I didn’t realize I’d been carrying.
That’s the thing: I don’t think we ever lose either side completely. We just take turns remembering which one we need to lean into.
Some days you need to sparkle through it. Some days you need to burn through it.
And maybe both are prayers, in their own way.
I don’t trust people who only ever show their Glinda. Life is too heavy for endless sweetness. But I also don’t trust the ones who live only in their Elphaba, because cynicism alone can’t heal anything.
The truth is somewhere between the two. Somewhere in the place where you can cry in your car on the way to work and still hold the door open for someone. Where you can love the world and also be furious with it.
Where you can say, “I forgive you,” and still never forget what it taught you.
When I was younger, I thought being “whole” meant being consistent—staying the same no matter what. But now I think it’s the opposite. Wholeness is letting yourself change. Letting yourself be more than one thing.
Some mornings I wear glitter. Other days I wear armor. Both are sacred.
Because the glow doesn’t make me fake, and the grit doesn’t make me dark.
They make me honest.
And maybe honesty is the real magic we’ve been avoiding all along.
I don’t have a perfect ending for this.
Just this: I’m learning to stop dividing myself into halves that need to compete.
I’m learning that my tenderness and my temper, my hope and my heartbreak—they’re not contradictions. They’re coordinates.
And when I stop trying to choose between them, I finally see the full map of who I am.
Both the spell and the spark.
