Every year, I choose a color to guide me.

How did I come up with this tradition? Simple: I didn’t. A few years ago, I saw someone on Instagram choose a color for their year, and I’ve done it ever since. I wish I remembered who it was so I could give them proper credit, but I don’t. I just remember thinking it was such a simple, tangible way to set an intention—and the idea stuck with me.

It’s less rigid than a resolution and more tangible than a word of the year. A color can hold a feeling, an intention and an entire season of life. It shows up in the clothes I wear, the things I bring into my home and the small details surrounding me. Over time, it becomes a quiet visual reminder of how I hoped to move through that particular year.

This year, my color is sage green.

Sage feels calm, grounded and generous – all qualities I knew I would need heading into a busy year. I knew several of my close friends were getting married, and as the year unfolded, another shared that a baby was on the way (eek!!). I knew it would be a season of competing priorities, full calendars and so many happy reasons to celebrate. So when I chose my color, I wanted it to represent showing up for others. I wanted to be present for the people I love, celebrate their milestones, support them through change and make the effort to participate in the lives unfolding around me.

Halfway through the year, I have learned that showing up can be wonderful, meaningful and deeply inconvenient.

All three can be true.

A Year Measured in Other People’s Milestones

One of the greatest gifts of this year has been the opportunity to celebrate the people I love.

There is something incredibly special about watching someone you care about step into a new chapter and knowing you made the effort to be there for it. The celebrations, trips, conversations, thoughtful gestures and ordinary moments of support have reminded me that relationships are not sustained by affection alone.

Love is something we choose to do.

We show it by:

• Attending the event even when the timing is inconvenient
• Remembering the detail someone shared weeks ago
• Checking in after the excitement has passed and everyone else has gone home
• Making the drive, booking the flight or rearranging the schedule when our own lives already feel full

Those decisions may seem small individually, but together they become the substance of a relationship. They say: Your life matters to me. This moment matters to me because it matters to you.

Choosing sage green has helped me live that intention more deliberately this year. When life becomes busy or being present requires extra effort, it reminds me of the person I want to be – dependable, thoughtful and generous with my time.

An Indoor Cat Leaves the House

It’s probably important to explain that showing up doesn’t come from a natural desire to have a packed calendar though.

As my boss likes to say, I’m an indoor cat.

When he said it the first time, I remember feeling incredibly offended (and worried it meant my career growth would be pretty stunted if he thought I wasn’t trustworthy to put in front of people). But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he didn’t mean it offensively – and he was right.

Any weekend, evening or stretch of time I get to spend alone is a dream. Given the choice, I would pick being alone versus being with other people 90% of the time. It’s not that I can’t be social or that I don’t enjoy being around people because I can be outgoing, engaged and genuinely happy to be.

But I prefer to come to people in my own time and in my own way.

For me, socializing is easiest when:

• I’ve had time to prepare for it
• I know the setting and the plan
• I have enough space around it to recharge
• I can show up with the energy to be fully present

That’s part of what has made this year meaningful. Showing up often requires me to override my natural preference for staying home. It means participating according to someone else’s timing because the moment belongs to them, not to me.

That’s part of what has made this year meaningful. Showing up often requires me to override my natural preference for staying home. It means participating according to someone else’s timing because the moment belongs to them, not to me.

That doesn’t make my presence more valuable than anyone else’s, but it does mean that each yes is intentional. I am choosing, again and again, to place connection above comfort because I want the people I love to feel celebrated.

We Got a Little Too Comfortable Being Comfortable

I’ve been thinking a lot this year about inconvenience.

Our generation has become really good at talking about “protecting our peace”, “guarding our energy” and “establishing boundaries”. And to be fair, much of that language has been necessary. We’re learning that exhaustion is not a virtue, constant availability is not the same as love and saying no does not automatically make someone selfish.

But we overcorrected.

We’ve started treating any inconvenience as a violation of our boundaries. If something is tiring, awkward, expensive, emotionally demanding or simply not what we feel like doing, we can label opting out as self-care and move on without examining what that choice costs someone else.

Not every uncomfortable obligation is toxic. Not every request for effort is unreasonable.

To be blunt – sometimes loving people and showing up for them is inconvenient.

Sometimes friendship looks like attending the event that would not have been your first choice for a Saturday night. Sometimes family means making space when your calendar is already crowded. Sometimes being a good person means showing up even when doing so does not feel restorative, productive or particularly fun.

As an indoor cat, I could make a convincing case for staying home every day of the week. I could call it protecting my energy, honoring my needs or listening to my body. Sometimes, that would even be incredibly true. Other times, it would simply be a more politically correct way of saying that I didn’t want to be inconvenienced.

A life built around never being inconvenienced may be comfortable, but would lack all connection.

Relationships ask something of us. We should be thoughtful about what we give, but we can’t expect meaningful relationships to exist without occasionally sacrificing our preferences for someone else’s needs.

Don’t Pretend You Have Never Let Someone Down

There is another side to this conversation that matters just as much.

If we are going to talk honestly about the people who have or have not shown up for us, we also have to admit that we have probably let someone down, too.

You can’t be the person who pretends you have always known exactly what every friend needed and have always shown up perfectly for them. Don’t rewrite the past so that you were 100% present in every important season. And you can’t immediately excuse the ways you fell short just because your intentions were good.

Sometimes we simply just don’t show up well. Sometimes we misunderstand what a friend needs, get consumed by our own lives or realize too late that a moment carried more weight than we understood.

It happens. That doesn’t make us terrible friends. But being unwilling to acknowledge it can.

I recently had an incredibly honest conversation with one of my bridesmaids, who is getting married next year. She apologized and told me she feels like she didn’t show up for me enough, or in the right way, during my wedding season.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I do or don’t agree with her. I definitely don’t look back on that chapter and think of her as a bad friend. But either way, I deeply appreciated the sentiment because, in retrospect, I remember feeling incredibly alone during that phase of my life.

I was the first person in my friend group to get married. None of us really knew what the season would require, including me. I didn’t know what kind of support I needed, so I didn’t know what to ask for. Instead, I largely tried to manage it myself and hoped someone would somehow recognize the things I could not yet articulate.

That’s obviously not fair to my support system. But the loneliness I felt was still real.

Both things can be true.

But what meant so much about my friend’s apology was that she was willing to look back honestly and consider that she may not have understood what I needed at the time.

She wasn’t defensive, she wasn’t looking for me to compliment her worries away or placate her. She simply acknowledged that, knowing what she knows now, she wishes she had shown up differently.

That kind of honesty creates closeness and gives a friendship somewhere to go.

I hope I can offer the same humility when a friend tells me that I missed something important. I hope my first instinct isn’t to build a case for why I was justified, but to listen. I hope I can accept that I may have loved someone sincerely and still failed to make them feel supported.

Intentions matter. Impact does, too.

Showing Up Requires Humility

Showing up isn’t about becoming the friend who never misses anything or disappoints anyone. That standard is impossible, and pretending otherwise only makes our relationships less honest.

What showing up actually requires is attention: asking people what support looks like instead of assuming we already know, and being willing to hear that our best didn’t always feel like enough to someone we love.

It also requires grace. The people in our lives will miss things, misunderstand us or become so wrapped up in their own seasons that they don’t recognize what we need. At some point, we’ll do the same to them.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s being honest enough to reflect, humble enough to repair and willing enough to try again.

The Edit: Choose Connection Over Comfort

Showing up doesn’t require you to say yes to everything. It asks you to be honest about why you’re saying no.

1. Accept some inconvenience: Make the drive. Attend the celebration. Send the text. Leave the house, even when a quiet evening and your own company sound infinitely better.
2. Ask instead of assuming: People don’t always know what support you need, especially if you’re not sure how to name it yourself.
3. Own the moments you missed: You can be a good friend and still have let someone down. A sincere apology doesn’t erase everything you did right.
4. Make room for repair: The strongest relationships aren’t the ones without disappointment. They’re the ones where disappointment can be discussed honestly.

Halfway through my year of sage green, I’m learning that showing up is less about perfect attendance and more about intentional presence.

It’s choosing connection even when comfort would be easier. It’s acknowledging when you didn’t get it right and it’s continuing to make the effort for the people you love and the relationships you want to keep.

I know this isn’t my usual kind of post. It’s a little more of a brain dump than a neatly packaged lesson because I’m still in the middle of learning it. I plan to revisit my year of sage green closer to the end of the year, when I’ve had more time to reflect on what showing up has meant, what it’s required of me and what else it’s taught me.