Five Stages of Yellow

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published"Yellow"
There is a heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle
- Mary Oliver

The year before I became a teenager I moved into a bedroom that was a narrow slice of yellow – the color of a pastel Easter egg or delicate icing on a birthday cake. The room was on the first floor of the house, and sleeping alone while everyone else was upstairs felt like both a rite of passage and also a kind of exile. At night, lying awake between those yellow walls, I’d think about how just last year I’d been upstairs in the mint-green bedroom, the one my sisters now shared. When it was mine, my aunt painted flowers on the wall, black-eyed Susans and wild zinnias with playful petals. In that room, I read the first Harry Potter book and spent hours playing school with my stuffed animals. But here in the yellow, there was no place to play school, and at twelve years old, I sensed that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be doing that anymore. 

The other girls my age flowered into adolescence wearing cherry-red lip gloss and purses that didn’t hold anything of value. A part of me longed to be like them, but another part, a bigger part, denied this curiosity. It told me if I ate less, as little as possible, I could stay small and hang onto childhood. It dismissed the idea that the yellow room was the beginning of change and assured me that if I controlled my body, I could keep myself from becoming an adult. In my mind, leaving childhood felt like a death – an irrevocable change that would swallow me whole. I thought becoming a woman meant my life would be filled with disappointment and pain, and in a sense, I was right. Growing, in any way, almost always means a part of me has to die. 

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about cycles of death and rebirth as I watch the leaves turn. Actually, I’ve been watching the leaf watchers watch the leaves – bikers who stop to point their cameras at the canopy. Children collecting and throwing cheerful bundles of yellow confetti. My newsfeeds have enough foliage to rake in the world’s largest leaf pile, a bounty of honey and maize. But for me, yellow is also kind of an unsettling color. It hints at infection, jaundice, and dehydration. Beyond the body, it’s the anxiety of rushing through a light or finding that one sweater that finally goes on sale but is only available in ~yellow~ If yellow were a person he’d be neurotic type who sneezes two, three, four times in a row. The kind last picked for dodge ball, or maybe someone who wears mismatched socks and has a weird hobby like playing the ukulele. What can I say, I’m just not a big fan of yellow.

But at this time of year, when the trees dress-up, yellow commands attention and awe. It’s a performance, a threshold, a bright last dance. Some of the yellow leaves will turn orange and red. All of them will fall and be crunched into brown crumbs or swept away. Yellow is the beginning of it all, the beginning of the end, a rare instance where we admire death. The leaves show that there’s vibrancy in transition, in their yellow impermanence – the hardest hue to hold. In this way, yellow is more than just a color; it’s also a signal that life is swaying toward a new season. 

This fall, I’ve been in transition after leaving a career in journalism and trying to decide what comes next. And as I watch the leaves, I’ve been reflecting on my own yellows, moments when a transformation was just beginning. Transitions that, like the color yellow, can be unnerving but also invigorating, when I’ve been caught in a moment of becoming, whether I’m ready or not. 

The yellow bedroom was one of those moments. A few years later, we moved into a new house where my bedroom was painted a heavy brown. I was still seeking control over my body and life, but once I realized I couldn’t stay a child forever, I swung in the opposite direction, counting down days until I’d be on my own. College came and afterward, I showed up in New York City, where the yellows were no longer soft or shy. New York’s yellows were the fluorescent haze of bodegas, the bright middle of an egg and cheese sandwich, taxis rushing and honking. I loved it, especially the taxis. There was a thrill of being able to just throw up my hand and flag down a cab to take me anywhere. I took taxis when I couldn’t afford them, over the Brooklyn bridge on weekend nights. There was freedom in these yellows but also an urgency and aggression that I felt as I tried to find my place in the city. I thought friends and love would stumble into my life like sitcom characters. Instead, I was lonely and still heartbroken over someone who had long stopped loving me. I was alone, and I buried my grief and rejection in a job, working late nights and taking cabs home. 

Soon, taxis became less of a novelty and more of a necessity, allowing me to snooze every alarm and still make it to the office. They were vessels of forgetfulness where I lost phones and wallets. They shuttled me to bars where I never knew my tipping point between fun and fall-down drunk. At the end of a night when I got into one of those yellow cabs that could take me anywhere, sometimes I couldn’t even remember the right address. I’d pass out in the backseat and be jolted awake by the driver’s voice telling me to pay the meter and get out. The yellow that burned so bright at the beginning wore off like a high, and I was left with everything under that pulsing excitement, my anger and resentment. My exhaustion from trying to keep the pace. 

By 2018 I moved to Europe, where I’d always wanted to live ever since I saw Van Gogh’s tumbling wheat fields and sunflowers in the Netherlands. I brought back a postcard of those sunflowers waving in wild yellows and hung it in my high school bedroom. Somehow, even then, I knew I wanted to move closer to these places, that this was the kind of yellow I was after, pastoral but tinged with a little chaos. I didn’t find a pastoral life in Berlin, but I did find chaos. Berlin’s yellows were dance floor lights and graffiti. Little pills and the yellow U-bahn rushing by against a heavy gray everything. When I first moved to the city, someone told me that these splashes of color were to help people get through the darkness. I thought she meant the darkness of winter when the sun sets before 4pm, but I soon learned that lack of sunlight is just one kind of darkness the city wears. The other shades are more insidious, something you slip into without realizing, though many people come here for exactly that reason. They take the city like a pill and get swallowed up, the way I worried about as a child. 

The first night I lived in Berlin, I went out for one drink and ended up booking a trip to Mallorca with strangers. I didn’t even know where Mallorca was and maybe that should have been a warning flag, but I kept returning to places and people whose darkness made it easier to avoid my own. It was only after the city shut down in 2020 that I felt the full weight of being myself. I was on a precipice, and I realized that if I wanted to find my place, I had to stop ignoring the glaring signs around me. 

Luckily, I wasn't on my own — I had a dog, and when there was nothing to do, we’d play fetch until the optic yellow tennis ball was stained permanently brown. We’d throw and catch and throw and catch, and I’d wonder if anything in Berlin would ever be bright or hopeful. Then I’d look up and see a flash of the yellow U-bahn rush by. 

In those years, there was so much waiting, so many days when it seemed like all my incremental efforts would never amount to anything. But then, everything did change. One night, there was a knock at my apartment door. It was a Sunday in the fall of 2021, and I had recently stopped drinking. I was ready to give up my old escapes and expected that I would now be entering an era of stillness and quiet. There would be no more frantic cabs, no more flashing lights, and I hoped that soon pastoral peace would arrive. I heard the knocking and answered the door, where my neighbor was holding a brown hoodie to her chest. “I need a cage,” she said. “I found a parrot!” 

The parrot was actually a parakeet, a yellow-feathered bird she’d found hobbling down the street, too weak to fly. We tracked down a birdcage and also tried to find the owner, but it was clear from the bird’s bald head and trembling body that it had not been cared for, maybe ever. 

I’m not exactly sure how the thing that happened next happened. I learned later that anyone in early sobriety should take care when making major life decisions. But that fall I was still lonely and hungry for a bit of wildness in my life, and so that’s how little yellow Ebba — Germanic for “strong” or “wild boar” — ended up living with me. 

I’m not going to go into the saga of how Kiwi, a blue parakeet, quickly joined our flock. But I’ll say this — everyone, including parakeets, needs a buddy and also, two parakeets are way louder than one. I had gone from the still silence of a new spiritual journey to constant bird chatter. In very Berlin fashion, I was living with a couple, my own Statler and Waldorf heckling me from their high perch and not giving a shit whether I was on a work call or wanted a moment of silence. I’d had parakeets as a child, ones that let me kiss and hold them, but this yellow girl wasn’t interested in my main character energy. She had the wildness I craved and became an untamed part of my world. She reminds me – constantly – that I’m not in charge of anyone’s nature and that inner peace isn’t built away from chaos but exists alongside it. 

It’s been three years since Ebba ushered me into my new life. She sleeps in a corner of my bedroom, which like that bedroom from my childhood, is a narrow slice of yellow in a golden hue that catches the sunlight at dusk. When I go to sleep, the walls hold me, and I think about who I’m becoming. This time, though, I’m not scared of the woman I’ll someday be. All my experiences – my disappointments, pains and joys – have brought me here to this transitional moment where uncertainty has started to feel more like an invitation than a punishment. Sure, existing in transition can be stagnant, and sometimes I just want all the yellow leaves of this phase to fall so I can move on to my next season. But also like the bedroom of my childhood, this phase is just temporary, and there’s beauty in that impermanence. I don’t need to know what’s next to trust that I’m moving toward a new threshold. As I write this, I can see the yellow leaves fluttering past my window, and I know that change is already underway.