Some of my favorite outfits

Over the past two years I’ve had quite a few of you inquire my whereabouts and make sure I was doing OK. I also promised to give you an explanation of what happened and why I stopped blogging.

My life has changed in many ways in a short amount of time. Most of you know that I lost my dad and subsequently started a new job. That job was a great learning experience, both personally and professionally. I stopped feeling the need to blog my outfits because the dress code there was very open and flexible. The CEO wore sweatpants, as did a handful of other employees. I’ve never been one to wear sweatpants to work and even though it was OK to do so there, I never did. However, I did end up with a uniform of sorts in the form of jeans, t-shirts and cardigans. So that’s what I wore nearly every day. At some point I decided that this type of outfit wasn’t worth documenting, because it wasn’t anything new or exciting. I figured that unless I was showing a variety of outfit types, I, along with readers, would get bored.

I was also faced with a coworker who would consistently question my sartorial choices and make fun of them, to my face, if she deemed them unworthy. For example, I do not wear matching socks very often. No one sees my socks and I always seem to get a hole in one sock, but not both. Rather than get rid of both socks, I keep the good one and wear it with another that doesn’t have a match. I don’t think it’s odd, but she did. I wore a pair of Halloween socks in April and she started informing me how it’s not Halloween and how stupid they looked. She did this in front of other coworkers and made me feel about three inches tall, because they’re socks, yet I felt embarrassed for wearing them. They didn’t affect my ability to do my job, but the fact that they impacted her life so much so that she had to tell me why I looked stupid made me begin to question why I wore them.

On another occasion, this coworker told me that I needed to make sure I “ didn’t look better” than her, as we were going on a presentation together, and I traditionally wear a suit for presentations. After this type of verbal harassment continued on a strangely consistent basis, I was in no mood to take photos of a mediocre outfit I had worn that day.

Around this same time Joe and I began house-hunting and packing up our belongings with the hopes of moving into our very own house before the end of 2012. Then, one week after my 27^th birthday, I went into work after putting an offer in on a house and I was told I was being laid off. You’d think with all my newly found free time I’d have time to blog again, right? Not exactly. Now I was wearing yoga pants along with my t-shirts and spending my time applying for new jobs, reading books and sorting out all the stuff Joe and I had hurriedly packed up to move into a house, which we obviously didn’t get because we lost my income.

And that brings us to today. I’m still looking for a full-time gig, and have been applying like a madman. I’d love to be able to showcase my style again, because it’s changed, as have I. I am not pairing insane color combinations together any longer, or wearing bright colors all the time. This week I’ve worn mostly black, grey and white, if you can believe it. My style has become less “WEAR ALL THE THINGS!” and has become much more “how can I look like an almost 30-year-old, while maintaining my sense of self and level of professionalism.” I’ve also started trying to maintain a master list of what I own, so I can choose better items to incorporate. Right now that lives on Pinterest, and is nowhere near an exhaustive list. I’m working on it. I have some plans and ideas to revive my wardrobe, my blog and myself. Hopefully I’ll begin to feel more like myself again, and more like myself than I have in the past two years.