A closet full of clothes and nothing to wear!!!

"I have nothing to wear", says me to myself one day last week.  

What!??

Crazy, right?  Except I am not crazy.  (Although a little crazy does keep it interesting.)  

I was standing in front of my closet when I had the thought, and said it out loud:  “I have nothing to wear.”  Over the last few months, I had been noticing that there were less and less things I wanted to wear.  But this was a first.  It was not simply a question of desire.  It felt deeper than that.  There was nothing FOR ME to wear…at all!?  The entire closet felt like it simply belonged to someone else.  

I was more than a little flummoxed. 

I am not, have never been, a ‘clothes horse’, i,e, a person who is very interested in clothes and likes to look fashionable, or follows fashion trends.  I like what I like. I wear what’s appropriate for the function.  Nothing flashy.  Just …whatever served the function.  And I rarely stepped outside of my “clothes comfort zone”.  The question of what I am going to wear was just whatever was required or appropriate for the day or the event.  I did not for the most part plan outfits.  I am a lawyer...there is a lot of black and white and it mostly tends to be structured.  Streamlined.  And it worked for me.  

I remember rolling my eyes whenever my mom or one of my friends would look in their very full and overflowing closets and bemoan the fact that they had nothing to wear.  And I would quietly, and internally, roll my eyes….because "please!!!  There must be something you can wear!!!"  Yet…here I was…decades later, and I was the one seemingly faced with the dilemma of having a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear.

Or maybe it was simply a case of mid-life crisis.  Because THIS was not me.

A midlife crisis is something, to be honest, I had mostly associated with older men and I would make the off the cuff, typical and clichéd reference to the acquisition of a red car etc..  Except, it seems, we too, the female of the species also go through something. Different from Peri-menopause and menopause.  A rite of passage?  A transition?  Perhaps.  Its ongoing for me, so jury out.  But simply put, a period of time in life where we question…I guess, everything.  Like, what are we doing with our life?  Every decision, every choice we had ever made, that got us to here.  It feels like we are assessing, taking stock of the lives that we have built and for whatever reason --- finding it lacking or unfulfilling in some respect.  And this unexplainable feeling of malaise seemed to stretch the full gamut.  It did not matter whether we were in our forties or fifties, married or single, mothers or not, happy in our chosen field, or not. successful or not.  In conversations across the board, it felt like we were all questioning.…our life.  Sure we had identified different ways to deal with it.  Whether it was reading, or writing, or working out, or going for a drive out, or chasing sunsets, or going for long walks in nature, or drinking wine.

And to be clear, I am not suggesting we are ungrateful.  Far from it.  We were, after all is said and done, living the life that we had each individually built based on a series of choices we had made, and in varying degrees owned that.  We were after all the architects of our lives. There was just…something.  

So on this ordinary weekday morning.  There I was.  Getting ready for my day.  Standing in front of my closet full of clothes. Wrapped in a towel, and there was literally nothing I wanted to wear.  Nothing that felt like me in that moment.  And it was not a case of not being able to find something appropriate to wear or matching my mood for a particular function… Cuz that’s not me …mostly.  As I mentioned before, it was as if, it all belonged to someone else.

And it turns out, the someone else was an earlier version of me…

Several months ago, I had noticed feeling a disconnect, in my professional life.  Saying that out loud is a big deal for me because this was something I had said I wanted to do for a long time. Then I studied for several years towards the attainment of same.  And at the end of the day ....it was alot of years invested in a career choice that no longer fit.  It was not the thought of no longer being --- as I was fine with that.  I had no ego or sense of self tied up in it. But there was an ongoing circuitous argument in my head, along the lines of 'I have given soooo much time, energy and money to this, how could I have got it so wrong?'  And 'had i really gotten it wrong?'   Followed by 'well, what next?'.  And 'what if this is all a glitch, and it would sort itself out.'  Around and around the reasoning went.   Was this arbitrary morning, faced with a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear the result of this disconnect?  No longer identifying with the available choice in clothes.

Perhaps?!  Maybe this glitch, this dilemma with the clothes, could be attributed to that, just part of the journey of life, and not midlife crisis…maybe?!  I suppose it is possible.

Maybe?