grieving our past selves

How much of your closet is for your current self? How much of it is for a past self?

If you're new here, I send a newsletter about the ways society makes it hard to simply put clothes on our body every Tuesday and post a discussion thread every Thursday. If you’re a regular here, you’ll know this post should have gone out tomorrow, but real talk, I hit the publish button by accident. Enjoy! 😂

On last week’s post about guilt, a conversation began in the comment section about the grief of letting go of the clothes that no longer fit (participating in these comment threads are one of the best perks of being a paid subscriber!)

One commenter posted:

A year ago I got rid of (ashamed to say how many) boxes of clothes that no longer fit. It took me years to work up to the reality that they were unlikely to ever fit again. Many of them were handmade and were really "me" in a way nothing off the rack could ever be. And they represented old selves that faded or that never really came to be (clothes for presentations, for being professional, for going out... none of which I do mu…