Patience, Darling.
Some mornings I stand in front of my closet and want to take a match to the whole thing.
Not because I don't have clothes. I have plenty. But getting dressed used to feel like something I did for myself. Lately it feels like a problem I have to solve before the day is allowed to start - negotiating comfort against polish, the walk to the bus stop against the office dress code, the right bra against the right top against the right shoes against the summer heat outside and the freeze of the AC inside. By the time I've worked through all of it I'm already tired and I haven't left the house yet.
Somewhere underneath all of that is the stylist inside me, watching quietly, wanting to feel like herself when she walks out the door. Lately she can't find herself in there.
Since March my brain has had too many tabs open.
New job. New consulting work. A business I'm building from scratch. A house closing. Constantly context switching - professionally, personally, socially - until my memory just goes and the months start blurring together. I look up and it's almost July and I genuinely cannot account for how I got here. I blinked and it was gone.
That's what this particular season has felt like from the inside. Not dramatic. Just a blur. Nothing fully loaded.
Getting dressed stopped being something I thought about and became just another thing to get through.
There's also the body piece. I'm going to talk about it because every woman knows this feeling and almost nobody says it out loud.
It's not a number. Not anything you'd necessarily see from the outside. It's the subtle internal shift - things feeling a little tighter in certain spots, not quite sitting on your body the way they used to. It might not look like anything has changed. You just know it has. And that gap between what shows and what you feel takes the wind out of your sails in a way that's genuinely hard to describe.
For me it's been layered with a knee that keeps flaring up years after surgery and forcing me to stop workouts entirely, lose momentum with my weight training, and sit with a physical frustration that goes deeper than just missing the gym. When your body won't cooperate the way you need it to or the way you’re used to, you feel it everywhere -including in front of the closet at 7am. The exhaustion is bone deep. The kind that doesn't lift.
So there I am. Standing in front of a closet that used to feel like possibility and now just feels like a standoff.
I think about my clients in these moments.
I think about the women who come to me feeling exactly this - disconnected from their own wardrobes, unable to find themselves in their own clothes, standing in front of a full closet that somehow has nothing to wear. I always tell them the same thing: this isn't really about the clothes. The clothes are just where it's showing up.
Turns out it’s time for me to take my own advice.
This is what being in the middle of something actually looks like. Not a reveal. Not a before and after. Just a Tuesday morning in June, standing in front of a closet, making peace with where you are.
Here's what I'm trying to hold onto.
On the other side of all of this - settled into the new house, into a new routine, with a knee that finally cooperates and a brain that finally has some breathing room - getting dressed is going to feel like what it's always meant to feel like to me.
Creative. Inspiring. Even on the simple days.
That's what I love about fashion - what I've always loved about it. Every outfit is its own small act of creativity. Every look has its own story, its own energy. Something entirely one of a kind, even if it's just jeans and a great coat on a regular weekday morning. That's always been beautiful to me. It still is.
I haven't lost it. I've just temporarily misplaced it under a very full season of becoming.
So I'm giving myself the same grace I'd give any woman standing in the middle of her own season of chaos and overload. I'm not going to force it. I'm not going to shop my way out of a feeling I need to just move through (can’t afford that). I'm going to close on this house, let things settle, and then rebuild — slowly, on purpose, for this exact version of me.
If this is where you are too, I see you.
Patience, darling. She’s still in there.