I asked for your fave unique compliments; and boy did you deliver

Last week, compliments seemed to follow me everywhere. And no — unfortunately for me — I don’t mean that in the way that it sounds; I wasn’t pushing past throngs of people all shouting out my different virtues. (I’m imagining Hannah Waddingham in Game Of Thrones going down the streets ringing that bell, but instead shouting “BABE! BABE! BABE!” Oh! What a hard life that would be!) No, I mean the concept of compliments, how we construct them, and what we really mean when we say them, cropped up a lot.

It’s a daily commitment I’m making to pay closer, much more interrogative attention to the words I use in order to be the best human I can be in this world anyway, but this particular flight of fancy was inspired by 3 totally separate, but very connected occurrences.

Firstly, we chatted with Nerrisa Pratt over on The Business Proposal Podcast a couple of weeks ago. In the episode, she very generously shared that she was done with hyper-productivity, and is instead using 2022 to reap the rewards of what she’s slogged away sowing. In turn, this got me thinking about what the compliment “God you’re such a machine!” — one I throw around with WILD abandon — is actually communicating.

Secondly, then, as if by magic, Tamu from Live Three Sixty posted this brilliant wisdom, where she referenced how so much of our language about humans is geared towards machines and commodification, which doesn’t reflect the complex nature of humanity.

Then, the 3rd horseman of my compliment revolution, the Letters of Note newsletter, popped into my inbox, this entry focussed on the writings of Virginia Woolf. One in particular caught my eye, and so I posted it on instagram:

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A post shared by Ellie, The Enthusiast 🍑 (@theenthusiastandco)

And the rest, as they say, is history! No, that’s not true. (Well, tbh, I think the comment about thinking it was a beam me up softboi post will go down in my personal history, but that’s different — big up Dulcie for that nugget of joy.) To accompany this ‘humane language for humans’, as Tamu so wisely put it, I asked my followers to submit the favourite compliment they’ve ever received.

Reading through all of your responses made me so emotional (which perhaps isn’t as surprising as it could be, considering I cried at a tomato over the weekend.) They stirred so much in me because they were so inventive, so creative, so wonderfully, unapologetically earnest that you could feel the love radiating from them — and that’s through a screen, from a person I’ve never met, about a person I’ve also never met!

I was also struck by a couple of things. For example, a lot of them used motifs of light, glowing, shining and sparkling, too — the very thing that enthusiasm is so often seen as. (What a win for the brand - cheers team!!) Also, totally randomly, the answers seemed to naturally chronologically gather themselves into topics. Below is how they came in, from first to last, and you can see that they often thematically clumped together: the first three are all on the vibe I just mentioned, there’s two inspirations together, and there’s a couple about education together too. There’s no scientific underpinning to this (…I don’t think) but it seemed pretty incredible to me, anyway, the same way that the aforementioned ombré tomato I had for dinner on Saturday struck me as pretty incredible.

Look, clichés are clichés for a reason — sometimes people just are the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, and that’s just a fact!!! — but I think it’s safe to say that these wonderfully creative, unique compliments pack much more of a punch.

Here are 21 of my favourites:

“It’s like you are full of glitter” (also…”you have eyes like my dog”)
“That I light up the room” — like the motherfucking star I am
“Your smile lights up a room”
“That Emma Thompson would play me in a movie of my life”
“That I was beautiful and wild”
“That I had good friendships because I deserved them”
“…if I took my shirt off I’d look like Jane Birkin”
“That I could talk my way out of anything or into anywhere” (I’ve proven it wrong multiple times)
“I come across as professional and creative with a twist of mad spaniel”. I. Will. Take. It.
“I seemed like someone who had done a lot of work on themselves”
My boyfriend called me “a dream” the other night out of the blue, I blushed a lot
“There are so many lovable things about you” after making a comment about tarot cards
“You inspire me”
“That I have inspired friends to go after their dreams”
“You’re the most well-read person I’ve ever met”
“I was horny for my lesson with you.” I later discovered that my student — who I’d like to stress was very much an adult — had mistranslated ‘excited’
“Raising an independent daughter like you is like the M25. Great idea but chaos in reality”
“I like your brain and how it works”
“Your smile lights up a room!”
“You helped me get through the worst night of my life”
“you have a face like a daisy”