According to my mum, when I was between 2 and 3 years old, my favourite film was Beauty and the Beast. I would watch it over and over again, several times a day, every day of the week, and yet a month – or a lifetime – wasn’t enough for me to watch it as many times as I really wanted. So much so that today, after abandoning it for many years, I sometimes find myself humming the songs while washing up or sweeping the living room for the fifth time in a day. I think that, without intending to, I ended up creating something much more powerful than myself: the habit of loving things intensely.

Despite my terrible habit of changing life projects every two seconds – my three university degrees can attest to that – I’ve never liked half-hearted things; this applies to relationships, mediocre work that I’d rather not turn in, and dessert. I believe life is too short to live it with the lightness and irresponsibility of splitting everything in half and being content with that. Besides, I’ve never liked maths, so division isn’t my thing.

I like to think that life isn’t made up of the ordinary, stifling moments of routine, but of those things we feel so intensely that when we try to explain them out loud, we’re left speechless. Like the excitement of watching for the first time, what will become your favourite series, the nostalgia of eating your favourite food from when you were 10, or the uncontrollable urge to smile when you see a puppy on the street. Those moments that, no matter how hard we try, we can’t explain.

Because of this intensity, I consider myself lucky to be able to believe that the unexplainable and the unexpected could be just around the corner and that my wildest dreams could someday come true simply because I believe in them more than I sometimes believe in my own reality.

I believe in the magic of (forgive the imminent redundancy of this phrase) believing in things that seem impossible. I don’t know if it’s because of my maternal family – half astrologer, half witch, half artist – or my insistence on making special what seems to have no sense or value. But beyond the stars, science, the law of attraction, and the ritual we saw on Instagram to ‘vibrate high,’ I firmly believe that the art of daring to want something with all the strength of our hearts is the true power to achieve the seemingly unattainable.

Do you remember ‘Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper,’ when Erika says that despite her debt and the possibility of always working in the dress emporium, she knows deep inside that one day she’ll be free to go sing around the world? That’s exactly what I’m talking about, the famous sixth sense that drives us to buy a summer dress that’s too cool and beautiful that we might not wear every day, but we save it for when Zac Efron invites us to a romantic dinner on the Amalfi Coast. It may seem silly, but allowing yourself to have that moment of delusional optimism can be one of life's most uplifting experiences.

It’s knowing that when they told us the sky was the limit, they weren’t referring to what we could reach with our hands – especially if we barely reach, and with much effort, five foot – but to how far our imagination could go. The moment we imagine it, desire it, and dream it, we end up ‘manifesting’ it and turning the impossible into the possible.

And believing in what seems unbelievable is also an act of self-love. Elle Woods decided to become a successful lawyer because she knew she deserved much more than a title of a superficial blonde, and Sharpay Evans ended up in a play in New York because she believed her talent would be enough to fulfil her dreams of being a star. Because from the moment we accept what we deserve and believe in our potential to achieve it, we become unstoppable.

For me, that’s what life is about: forgetting about answers no one has asked us for and stopping the hunt for explanations for everything. Sometimes the best thing we can do is allow ourselves to dream big and believe that one day we’ll get an unexpected call, take a flight to the city we always wanted to visit, or that Lindsay Lohan will invite us for a coffee because she’s running late and doesn’t want to have breakfast alone.

Let’s allow ourselves to be bold, intrepid, dreamers, even if they want to label us as crazy, or hysterical for it – we know it won’t be the first or the last time – because, if watching Beauty and the Beast more than a thousand times taught me anything, loving ourselves intensely also means living like Kim Kardashian in 2008: with the full awareness that we gave it our all because we believed in ourselves.