Stuck
The first panic attack of my life happened in a Zara dressing room. Which feels, in retrospect, completely appropriate.
It was the early days of Zara in America, and I was beside myself. I piled twelve hangers over my arm and walked in with the optimism of a woman who believed a $40 mini dress was going to change her life.
The dress was beautiful. No zipper, no stretch, a pull-over-the-head situation that I did not register as the warning sign it was.
The pulling-on phase went fine. It was the trying-on phase that went wrong. Too tight in one place, too short in another. I needed it off. NOW. I reached up to pull it over my head.
And, it got stuck. Specifically, it got stuck with my arms pinned up by my ears, my head inside the fabric, and my vision a polyester sunset.
The little dressing room got hot. The lighting was the special fluorescent Zara has perfected to make the human face look like a forensic crime scene. I started sweating. The sweating made the polyester tighter. The tighter it got, the more panicked I got, until I was a woman in a poly-blend straitjacket having her first encounter with the thought that she might actually die in a Zara dressing room.
I will spare you the indignity of the extraction. But I left that stupid store differently that day.
A dressing room is a courtroom that we keep walking into hoping to be acquitted. And I had walked into mine carrying a question I'd never once said out loud, hoping a dress could answer it for me. Am I enough yet?
It was a lot to ask of a $40 polyester mini.
Most of us go into the dressing room asking, am I worthy of this piece?
The right question is, is this piece worthy of me? The mirror only reflects what you bring into the room.
PUT ON your power before you reach for a single hanger today. Don't ask any piece to hand it to you. Ask each piece if it deserves you. Watch how the reach changes
.