Spread The Sparkle Effect: A Radical Kindness Movement
I think it’s finally time I tell you what I mean when I say “The Sparkle Effect.”✨
It was a name I was given early in my days of stopping drinking, in late 2024.
For a little while, I thought it might be a business.
We made things. We set up a booth. We even did a craft fair. There have been stickers and glitter and a very pink desk we rescued from Facebook Marketplace that has already lived a whole life of its own.
But the booth was short-lived because somewhere along the way I realized the Sparkle Effect was never really something I was supposed to sell.
It was a way of life.
A practice of noticing people. Encouraging strangers. Leaving large tips in memory of those we lost. S
aying the kind thing while you still have the chance to say it. Leaving a place, a table, or a person with a little more light than you found there.
For me, it is also faith.
Not faith that requires a stage or a perfect explanation. Faith with its shoes on. Faith that says maybe we don’t always get to know why we crossed someone’s path, but we can choose what we leave behind when we do.
Back in January, I made this notebook during one of those streams of consciousness when an idea simply wouldn’t leave me alone.
Sparkle School.
The assignment:
Write something you wish someone had said to you on a dark day.
Take what you need. Leave a little light behind.
I imagined notebooks like this in nursing homes. Hospitals. Libraries. Coffee shops. Waiting rooms. Anywhere someone might open one while feeling forgotten and discover that a stranger had already left them a sentence to hold onto.
And then that person could leave something for the next one.
That’s the Sparkle Effect.
Dolly’s passing has made me think even more about what happens to the light a person puts into the world. A life ends. The kindness doesn’t have to.
Ryan has built a little digital home for the Sparkle Effect now. Not because we’ve suddenly figured out exactly what it needs to become, but because I think it’s finally time to stop keeping it tucked away in this pink binder.
Maybe Sparkle Notebooks begin appearing in communities everywhere. Maybe people make their own. Maybe we eventually have a map covered in little points of light.
Maybe the battered pink desk becomes Sparkle Headquarters after all.
I don’t know exactly where it goes from here.
But I know what it is.
Be kind on purpose.
Tell people the good thing while they’re here to hear it.
Take the light you need.
Then leave some for the next person. ✨
So let’s open the notebook:
What is something you wish someone had told you during one of your darkest days?
And there is your whole philosophy hiding inside that little phrase:
Not a brand. A way of life.
Take what you need. Leave a little light behind.
