I spent the first half of my life believing freedom meant having endless choices. I am beginning to think it means knowing which ones are actually yours.
Paris Fashion Week is happening, and some of my favorite influencers are sitting front row while I did my own little catwalk out the front door. There were no photographers waiting on the sidewalk, but I did hold the attention of a small herd of deer, who watched the entire show and, to their credit, offered no notes.
I have always loved clothes, but the best style inspiration rarely makes me think, I need that jacket. It sends me back to something already hanging in my closet wondering why it never occurred to me to wear it that way.
A wardrobe becomes personal over time. The blouse you've owned forever suddenly works with trousers you nearly gave away; something expensive looks better beside something that cost almost nothing. Someone else may provide the spark, but the pleasure comes when the reflection feels unmistakably familiar.
Maybe that is the difference between woe is me and wow, that's me.
I can admire something spectacular and know immediately it should never come home with me. Years ago, I might have wondered what needed changing about my body. Now I usually think of the friend who would look fabulous in it and send her the link.
None of this means I have made complete peace with gravity. I love the South. I was born there, raised there and remain deeply devoted to it; I simply did not intend for several body parts to establish permanent residency there, although gravity appears to have taken my regional loyalty far too literally.
Somewhere between knowing what belongs in my wardrobe and what should remain beautifully on somebody else, I began wondering why that distinction had taken me so much longer everywhere else.
How much of a life do we spend reshaping ourselves around something simply because we once wanted it?
A friendship can have been wonderful and become exhausting. Work that once energized you can begin taking more than it gives. A role you wore comfortably for years can start feeling foreign. Even a dream can remain perfectly worthy and cease to be yours.
Women are particularly gifted at resisting that conclusion because we know how to make things happen. Give us the impossible schedule, the relative nobody wants seated beside Uncle Robert, the holiday nobody volunteered to host and a dinner reservation for eight that mysteriously became fourteen, and before anyone else has located another chair, we have reorganized the evening.
That talent can save families, careers, friendships and Thanksgiving. It can also keep us investing ourselves long after the only persuasive argument left is how good something used to be.
Sometimes the hardest thing to release is not what failed us, but what once suited us perfectly and no longer does.
Perhaps knowing that has made me more generous about what belongs to other women too.
Social media is saturated, but saturation does not have to mean competition. When I find a woman whose clothes I love, whose writing moves me or whose perspective makes me stop and think, I share her because I hope the people who trust me will be inspired by her too. Another woman's brilliance does not require mine to dim.
That is why I remain baffled that almost every genuinely cruel comment I receive comes from a woman over fifty. I've always been a girl's girl. Mean girls grow up to be mean women, apparently, but carrying comparison for decades seems like an awfully heavy accessory.
There are enough readers, ideas, opportunities, beautiful things and interesting lives to go around. I can applaud what belongs to you without calculating what it means about me, and celebrate your turn without assuming mine has been cancelled.
The same discernment has made me more particular about where I spend myself. I want work that asks something new of me, people who improve a conversation simply by joining it, places I haven't seen, ideas capable of changing my mind and enough curiosity to keep surprising myself.
What I no longer want is the exhausting project of forcing the wrong thing to become right.
There is nothing defeatist about recognizing that a person, plan, ambition or version of yourself has given you everything it came to give. Sometimes knowing yourself means having the grace to be grateful without insisting on forever.
I still want an unreasonable amount from life. The difference is that I am finally learning which desires are genuinely mine and which ones I picked up because somebody else made them look good.
I spent years believing the trick was making everything fit. Now I know the better life is the one that fits me, with plenty of room left for whatever I haven't thought of yet. Don’t stop me now.
The best style inspiration doesn’t make you want someone else’s closet. It makes you look at your own with better ideas.
Many of you who read me here aren’t on social media, so I wanted to bring a little of that part of my life over here too. I share what I’m wearing because sometimes one unexpected combination is all it takes to make something you already own feel completely new.
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