A few years ago, I sat down to lunch with a friend.
I could see it before the menus came. She didn’t feel good. Not sick, just dimmed. She talked about her life with the sound turned down, and she kept wrapping her long sweater a little tighter around herself.
So I asked her the question I ask every woman who has stopped feeling good.
What piece in your closet do you have too many of?
She didn’t even pause. “My cardigans, Melissa. I wear one every day.”
Then she heard her own answer and sat with it for a moment.
“I’m not wearing these to feel beautiful. I’m wearing them to hide.”
She wasn’t wrong. Those long cardigans were soft and drapey, easy and effortless. And they covered her body just enough.
Each one was a small daily agreement with the part of her that did not yet feel safe to be seen.
So before we left the table, I gave her a challenge. “Go home and pull every one of them off their hangers and see if you can live without them for a while.”
She accepted.
Fast forward six months. This friend met me for lunch again but this time she was hardly recognizable.
“What happened?!” I asked her with a smile.
She proceeded to share with me how getting rid of a rack of cardigans changed her life. She was wearing color, for starters. She made changes in her business. She even started therapy with her husband, which felt long overdue.
“The cardigans turned up in every area of my life: my style was just the start. It inspired me to re-evaluate everything from this lens.”
My friend and I both learned the skill of dimming at an early age. For her, it manifested itself as a rack of cardigans. This is the skill of reaching for the piece that lets you move through the day without quite being looked at.
Most of us taught ourselves to disappear so cleverly we never noticed. Normally there’s at least one clue in your closet.
If you want to know where to look, ask yourself the same question.
What piece in your closet do you have too many of?
PUT ON the piece that lets you be seen today, and notice the one you almost reached for instead. You don’t have to throw it out yet, just see what you have been agreeing to.
Love this.