It was last Friday, after a full week of work and after-work events…I did not rest, I did not sleep and here I was, on my bedroom floor…with my entire closet and drawers emptied out on the bed.

It’s officially my birthday month tomorrow, but we are already well into Virgo season and on the heels of the lunar eclipse last week, my insides have been as chaotic as my outsides. I turn 43 on the 22nd, and I’m taking full advantage of what this season means to me each year…it’s my NEW YEAR! So, beyond my closet, my to-do lists and my birthday preparations (which I take VERY seriously), I also take this time to take inventory…of my life, of my whole self. September has always been my real new year, more than January ever is supposed to be…sure, I guess January is for resolutions, but September is for reckoning.

Our closets…if you’ve lived a few lives like I have…are personal archives…museums…time capsules where every hanger holds a different version of you. Every era you survived is hanging right there in cotton and denim and that one silk thing you can’t believe you had the lady balls to even buy in the first place. You want to know who someone used to be? Don’t read their journals, open their closet.

So there I was, pulling it all out to take inventory and finally do a major purge. Millie’s away at camp, which is maybe the only reason this was able to happen at all…I’ve got a quiet apartment, Yas is working away in his office and no one flopping on the bed in the middle of my piles, no eleven-year-old holding something up and asking why I ever wore it or calling it sus. She’s at the age now where she’s pressing on the edges of her own style, testing modesty and individuality and how much of herself she’s allowed to show the world. I kept thinking about her while I did this, even with her gone. So much of what’s in my piles, I didn’t actually choose for myself…I chose it for who I thought I was supposed to be at the time.

Let me back up.

I got married the first time at 22…fresh out of college, I had zero clue who I was and even less of a clue what my style was, because I didn’t have one yet. My first job out of college was as a graphic designer at a wine and liquor company’s printshop, so I dressed the part…khakis, work trousers, sensible blouses, the uniform of a girl trying to look employable and grown and adult. I was playing a character called Professional Adult Woman…and yes, I looked like a small child trying to wear my mom’s clothes.

The only thing I knew, even then, even with no style to speak of, was this…I loved the juxtaposition of vintage and modern…I loved artistic patterns, pops of color, a statement piece that walked into the room before I did. That was the one true thing that would remain throughout every version of myself, and just like any good compliant girl, I kept burying it.

Then came the “wife clothes”...the modest-Christian-woman clothes…the dressing-like-a-married-woman clothes, where you’re quietly styling yourself to look like someone’s respectable other half. Then a few years later, the marketing-director clothes, back when I was climbing the professional ladder, and also silently drowning in infertility at the same time, questioning absolutely everything about myself, my marriage and my life. I signed up for Stitch Fix in that era…let a stranger mail me clothes to try, because I trusted her instincts more than my own. And sure, they nudged me out of my comfort zone a little, but mostly I was still dressing safe…comfortable…working-girl-holding-it-together vibes.

Then we adopted Amelia, and I leaned ALL THE WAY into workout-clothes-mom. Listen…running after a toddler will do that to you…I needed to get low, crawl on the floor, climb whatever she climbed, chase that little spitfire across a playground. Leggings and sneakers weren’t a style choice, they were a survival strategy…and I still snuck in a statement piece when I could, still reached for the colorful, big earrings, but I was still…SO confused about who I was underneath all of it.

The only time the real Jess broke through was in New York.

I used to fly up to visit Marie, back when the city and I were still in our courting phase, and every single time I got off that train I felt my style unclench. In New York I could be edgy…I could be sexy, even…creative, artistic, a little dangerous. This was my shot to wear pieces that would’ve gotten me a look in Charlotte, in the version of me I was down there…but, the city gave me permission I wasn’t ready to give myself yet. I knew in my bones…if I ever had the chance to finally live in NYC, that version of myself would FINALLY be unleashed.

And then we did…we finally moved here…BUT, it was March 2020. Anybody remember what was going on in March 2020?!

The only thing I was unleashing was my various face mask couture. I was in quarantine, bound to my apartment, and about twenty pounds heavier in a body that felt completely foreign to me. I was stressed out of my mind, scared that I made a terrible mistake moving our entire lives because I wanted to become a chef, in a marriage that didn’t quite fit anymore, and we were doing everything we could to try to force it to.

I was lost, and my clothes showed it…everything I put on was a way to mask…mask the weight, mask the sadness, mask the fact that I was profoundly unhappy and couldn’t find the words to say so. Turns out…you can hide A LOT inside an oversized everything.

Around that time, that’s when I finally got a job at a restaurant and started to become a chef…and I started climbing. Real, actual climbing this time, not just toddler-chasing or scaling that professional ladder. The workout gear came back but it meant something different now…it meant strength, it meant hours on my feet doing work that felt like it was really mine, and mine alone. The weight eventually came off, too, walking miles daily throughout the city will do that to you. Slowly, in the mirror, I started to see her again…me…the one who’d been in there the whole time…the one who always liked those bold looks, those statement pieces.

And then I made the decision to separate, to divorce…to end seventeen years.

That kind of severance…the kind where your whole life splits open…no part of your world is safe…least of all, your closet. I moved into my own apartment, alone, for the first time in my entire life. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have anyone to answer to, anyone to run an outfit by, anyone whose opinion I’d absorbed so deeply I mistook it for my own. I was just me, and then every other week, Amelia, too. That emptiness, which should have been terrifying, was actually the most freeing thing I’ve ever felt.

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And I started to dress like it, too.

I played with texture, I showed more skin…I mean…there was, if I’m honest, a LOT more cleavage happening in those days. Crop tops, wide-leg pants, colors and patterns and pieces that made noise. For the first time in 40 years, I felt like me…the Jess who started dating, confident in her own body and her own skin, finally, after four decades of borrowing everyone else’s idea of who she should be or what she should look like.

That was the era stacked on my bed, in front of me the other day. I realized, in that moment, paralyzed by the piles, those were the clothes hardest to release.

Not the wife-clothes, or the mom-clothes…those went in the bag without a fight. Not the trad-mom pieces that made me feel like I was dressing a sixty-year-old in disguise. To all of those, good riddance and sayonara, bitches. The hardest ones to part ways with were the rebellion clothes, the little strappy things I bought when I was newly free and figuring out exactly how much of myself I wanted to show the world. Those were the clothes that represented my liberation…they were the costume of my great escape.

So I packed them up and sent them away to a new home, but you know what? I didn’t get rid of it all…I kept the sexy, she stays. I’m not releasing the woman, I’m just releasing the proving. There’s a difference between dressing like you’re free and being so free you no longer have to announce it or prove it.

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As I sat on my floor, taking stock of all I’ve experienced…all I grieved…all I’ve been through in my almost-43 years, I realized that’s where I actually am now. I’m in my second marriage, with a partner who has never once made me feel invisible, never with an opinion or judgement about what I “should” be wearing (except for that pair of black pants he said I looked like a server in, those I parted ways with earlier on…because honestly, they were a projection of someone I was trying to look like and not who I actually was…so he was right…don’t tell him I said that:). Nobody in this house tries to style me into a role. It’s changed what or who the clothes are for…when you’re not escaping anymore, you don’t have to dress like you’re escaping. When you’re not fighting for your freedom, you can stop wearing the uniform of the fight…you can actually get dressed for your actual life now.

Which brings me back to my girl Millie…thinking about her as we’re only a couple weeks away from a big transition for her…entering middle school.

She’s been watching me for years now…watching how I decide what to keep and what to say goodbye to. I want to model something for her that I didn’t understand until I was well into my forties…something I wish the eleven, twenty-two, or even thirty-year-old me would’ve known then. I want her to find her own style without contorting it around anyone else’s comfort. I want to be even a little feminist about it all, letting her wear what she wants. I want to also give her the wisdom gained after four decades of learning the hard way…that the short shorts that hug every inch of you, the ones that make you walk funny and chafe your thighs raw…those aren’t actually about freedom or individuality…they can’t possibly be:) Who are you performing that discomfort for? Comfort is allowed to be the point…and so is joy. I want her to always choose her own joy over impressing anyone else or trying to be anyone else other than herself.

Three hours and two full donation bags later, all the former versions of me were packed away and sealed and set by the door. I hugged a lot of it goodbye…and gave them all the goodbye they deserved…the wife who dressed for the pew…the mom who dressed for the sixty-year-old inside her…the newly-single woman in the strappy dresses who needed the whole world to see she was finally free. Thank you…I needed all of them to get to where I am now.

And what’s left, hanging in a closet that finally has some breathing room, is just…me.

The me turning 43 next month. Confident, creative, and yes, still sexy. The one who loves a statement piece and a pop of color and an asymmetrical line that doesn’t do the expected. The workout clothes for my hours in the kitchen and the sundresses for when it’s too damn hot for pants. The fall and winter layers I’m genuinely counting the days to build. The weekend dresses that are purely, only mine…the ones I wear to the farmers market and the coffee shop and dinners with my girlfriends and my favorite restaurants, the ones I wear to drop Millie at school and dance, to sit on the couch with my husband and watch our shows, to see family, to walk around this city I know and love now instead of just visit.

Every single thing I kept is for the me that’s here, the one that’s rising from all the layers that have been peeled away. The older versions I was scared to let go of…and especially the future versions I once thought I was supposed to become.

Where I landed, on the floor, surrounded by two decades of costumes…I’m not going to predestine the me I should be in the future, either. I want to let the future stay a blank slate…to let the Jessica of 45, of 50, of 60 decide for her own god-damn self who she wants to be and what she wants to wear when she gets there. Who am I to hang clothes in a closet for a woman I haven’t met yet?

That girl needs freedom…let’s give it to her.

The Statement Piece