This weekend Kamran and I finally got around to doing a task we’ve been putting off for weeks: cleaning out our closet.  With the spring weather coming, it’s time to take out our lighter-weight clothing and put away our warm winter items.

Within our dresser drawers lay bits and pieces of our past lives that we left behind, but couldn’t quite let go of.  To say that a lot has happened in the past few years might be an understatement.  We’ve gotten married, purchased a home, and started our business.  We barely feel like the same people anymore.

The remarkable thing about this whole exercise, though, is not how hard it is to let go of my old items that no longer suit me.  I’m surprised to discover how many items I have in my closet that I purchased but NEVER wore.  As in, they still have the tags on them.  All these years, and I have never quite been able to let go of the person who I thought I should be.

I went through a period after I got my first job where I thought I needed to wear a lot of suit jackets.  I remember buying them whenever I found them on sale, storing a small collection of them in my closet as if they held the key to a successful professional life.  It’s like I thought that suits were the uniform for grown up, successful, women, so I stocked up.

Yet, I never wore any of them.  Not once.  I just kept them in my closet, unable to let them go, even though whenever I tried them on they never quite fit right or felt comfortable enough to actually wear.

Now that I have been out of a regular office environment for a couple of seasons, I finally feel confident enough to let these jackets go.  They were never a good fit for me.  And that’s ok.  I need the space in my closet and my life for other things.

Other, cuter, things. 😉