How Do I Want to Feel Today
Dressing for yourself in the middle of becoming someone new
It was 4:30 this morning when the question found me.
Dark outside.
Driving to the office before most people’s alarms have gone off. A podcast playing. Mel Robbins, a stylist named Erin Walsh, talking about clothes and how women get dressed.
She teaches one question to ask before you reach for anything.
How do I want to feel today?
I sat with that for a minute. And then I laughed a little, quietly, to myself.
Because I had already answered it.
Black jeans. A t-shirt. Sport shoes.
Good enough for fourteen hours at a desk, honest enough that I did not have to think about it twice.
No show. No audience.
Just me and what the day needed.
Last week I cleared the closet.
The skinny jeans. The tight cardigan. The yoga pants marked XXS, bought during the years I went to class seven days a week and thought that showing up every day to a mat meant I was becoming my best self.
I was smaller then. I was also trying very hard.
There is a gap between those two things that took me a long time to see.
Those clothes were not just a size.
They were a whole version of me. The woman who was focused, present, on trend, taking up less space and calling it growth.
Some of them I loved because everyone else had them.
Some of them I kept long after they stopped fitting because letting go felt like giving up something I was not ready to give up.
Standing at the closet pulling them out, I felt two things at once.
Grief.
Real grief. Not the big kind, just the quiet kind that arrives when you hold something that used to mean something and feel that it does not fit anymore.
Not the body.
The life.
The tight cardigan was from a season when I was a certain kind of woman, held together, put together, working hard to look it.
The XXS yoga pants were from the years of trying hardest. Seven days a week on the mat. A body that was smaller because I was pushing so hard to keep it that way, telling myself it was about health. About devotion. About becoming.
Some of it was.
Some of it was not.
This season has a way of making that harder to blur.
And relief.
The quiet, real kind.
Each piece that went into the bag felt like setting something down I had not known I was still holding.
This morning at 4:30, before the sun came up, I was already dressed for myself.
I did not plan it.
I did not think about it.
I just reached for what was true.
That is not a style change.
That is something quieter.
Something that took longer to arrive than I thought it would, and feels, now that it is here, like the most normal thing in the world.
The clothes I let go of were a record of who I was trying to be. What I am wearing now is something closer to who I am.
If you open your closet this week and feel that low friction, nothing feeling right, nothing feeling like you, maybe it is not a problem to fix.
Maybe it is an invite to ask one question first.
How do I want to feel today?
Start there. The rest gets simpler.
Dressing for yourself is not a small thing. It is, in its quiet way, a form of strength
I’ll be here next Friday. Same time, same quiet.Come sit with me,
Tew Green
In The Pause Life
Transition·Tend·Strengthen·Savor·Become