The Invisible Glowup
I frequently feel like the luckiest girl in the world, but rarely quite so much as this year, when I was given the opportunity to relive not one but two of the greatest experiences of my life: the farewell trip I took with my best friends after high school, and my time studying in southwest Ireland in college. Recreating happy memories is a lot like meeting your heroes – it can recharge you or deflate you. Sometimes everything has changed. Sometimes, far worse, nothing has changed. And sometimes, blessedly, you pick up right where you left off.
I’ve been blessed with several trips to Ireland in my life. The landscape, music, people, etc. have a very serious emotional pull on me. Going back always feels like a risk, because I always worry I’ve built her into something that she’s not. This time, I was also seeing friends I hadn’t really seen since college. Last time, we were 21-year-olds drinking our calories back and dignities away after all-day hikes, writing notes to each other on Starburst wrappers in the library as we frantically crammed for exams, eating a minimum 5 meals a day (gosh, I miss second breakfast) and staying up all night to watch hockey broadcasts from Chicago. Had my friends changed? Had Cork changed? Had I?
Well, yeah. We were supposed to. Wisdom came to me, as it always does, from my 14-year-old sister, Francesca. “Don’t try to make it the same trip,” she cautioned the day I got there, enlightening me to the fact that so many of my expectations were based on factors I couldn’t control – weather, bus schedules, my shrinking alcohol tolerance, and whether or not Haribo was still making Rhubarb-Custard Splats (tragically, they’re not). So much had changed. And the moment I got that, it felt like nothing had.
“The same feeling doesn’t come twice from the same things.”
Cork’s not quite the same town it was last time I was there. O’Flynn’s still serves life changing sausage sandwiches, but there’s also a Japanese restaurant of international acclaim (and several more that are just straight-up great). Tom Barry’s, the former Mountaineering Club dive bar, now has Neapolitan pizza, a wine list, a credit card machine, and a heated garden with an Aperol spritz sign (much to our chagrin). There’s a Pride celebration bigger than St Patrick’s day. University College Cork has gotten a serious gardening glow-up. For better or worse there are now two Starbucks. We’re not the same either. We all graduated from our respective programs. We have jobs, life experience, and plans for the future. We’ve travelled more, seen more, done more. But Cork is still Cork. The beer, tea, music, food, landscape, most importantly my kickass crew, were no different for us all having appropriately grown up. We still chatted into the night, shared the same laughs, and I left as rested and recharged as I did at 21.
When I left Cork for a solo retreat to Dingle I found the same thing – my favorite chowder place closed, but an incredible whiskey and gin distillery opened. I didn’t have time to bike the peninsula, so I snagged the last stop on a bus tour and ended up spending much longer at each vista. I didn’t relive my last experience there – I had the 2019 version. It wasn’t the same trip but I felt the same way when I left. And the lesson I learned applies to life and branding: the same feeling doesn’t come twice from the same things.
As a brand, nostalgia is a powerful but difficult field to navigate. We hear all the time from companies that have had the same branding for 10 years, but don’t want to change from something that has worked for them in the past. And the instinct makes sense – familiarity is a powerful feeling, and authenticity is crucial. But consistency is not a passive act. The Beyoncé of 2019 is after all not the Beyoncé of 1999. If you want people to react to your brand as they always have, you have to grow with them. If you want people to feel that nothing has changed, it’s not enough to simply stay the same.
“The Beyoncé of 2019 is not the Beyoncé of 1999.”
Of course the flip side is that you have to keep the integrity of your brand, your city, yourself. Friendly’s, a Northeast restaurant chain that was once the site of every post-football game/ballet recital, last day of school, sleepover, and high school movie-night junk food binge, has floundered through an identity crisis of makeovers over the past decade, and closed most of its restaurants in the process. First modern, then retro, then modern-retro, they lost sight of what made them special. And every time a Friendly’s closes a little piece of my childhood dies (Friendly’s if you’re listening, we’d like to help you). The first step to a glow-up is understanding your spark.
This April, I took a trip to Philadelphia with my four best friends from high school. It was the first time we were all in the same room since our graduation trip to New Hampshire. And while we talk all the time, I was curious to see what the dynamic would be when we all got back together. The truth was better than I dared hope for. We made the creepy-ass North Philly murder apartment we unwittingly rented a home with ice cream, chips, and (for the first time) beers. Where we once speculated late into the night, we now related experience late into the night. We know more about the world, and still more about what we don’t know, and what we have to learn from each other. Since graduation we’ve had hangovers and hookups, experienced love and heartbreak, graduated again and found our callings. We better accept ourselves and the world around us. We’re now lawyers, journalists, business owners (and a doctor and architect in training!). And if I do say so myself, we look absolutely phenomenal. When I look at this crew, I see 5 teenagers full of nervous potential who became 5 self-assured women. When we get together, it feels like we’re still those 5 teenagers, but that’s only possible because of the women we’ve become. Whether it’s friendship, location, or design, the truth is that when nothing has changed, odds are everything has.
