I recently learned there’s a name for something I’ve been doing for about twenty years. Whimsy-maxxing! Of course there is. Leave it to the internet to take a perfectly organic personality trait and give it a hashtag.

Apparently, whimsy-maxxing is a decor trend where you intentionally add joy and playfulness to your everyday life including your home, your routines, and your little rituals. It’s maximalism’s slightly unhinged, glitter-loving cousin. Think pf it as objects that serve no real purpose other than making you smile. Kitsch. Color. Tiny delights that whisper, “this is unnecessary and I love it.”

To which I say welcome to my entire adult life.

For years, I’ve been collecting what others might generously call “nontraditional” art. Less generously? “Mimi, what is that?” Pieces that made me pause, laugh, tilt my head. Things that didn’t match anything. Things that didn’t need to. At some point, I realized I wasn’t curating a space. I was curating tiny moments of joy.

And yes, I’m sure there were people who thought I was a little quirky. (Fine. Still do.) But here’s the thing. Whimsy isn’t chaos. It’s intention. It’s choosing delight on purpose in a world that often feels aggressively beige.

Because adulting, left to its own devices, is aggressively beige.

Whimsy-maxxing, this newly named movement, is really just permission. Permission to buy the oddly shaped lamp. To hang the art that makes no sense. To choose the mug that looks like a frog instead of the sleek minimalist one that whispers “taxes” and “responsibility.”

It’s the understanding that joy doesn’t have to be earned or saved for special occasions. It can sit on your shelf. It can greet you in the morning. It can be baked into the mundane.

I didn’t know I was part of a trend. I just knew that life felt better when it was a little weirder, a little brighter, a little more mine.

So if this is whimsy-maxxing, then I’ve been maxed out for decades.

And honestly? I highly recommend it.