If someone cares about your choice to wear a red dress, green pants with an orange top, or a combination of a patterned skirt, shirt, and blazer, that’s their choice. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with your colorful outfit. It could simply be that their life and wardrobe are so dull that they choose to focus on you and what you’re wearing—something interesting.

People who are happy and engaged in their own lives won’t spend time judging others. They’re too busy living their lives.

There’s a powerful quote from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic that helped me overcome this obstacle:

“Long ago, when I was in my insecure twenties, I met a clever, independent, creative, and powerful woman in her mid-seventies who offered me a superb piece of wisdom. She said: ‘We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect because we are so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking of you, anyhow.‘ They aren’t. They weren’t. They never were.”

So, your desire to wear colorful outfits is the only permission and approval you need to go for it.