But do you actually like, LIKE it?

On letting go of things we've been storing away in our cupboards and minds for far too long.

Photo by Mikołaj on Unsplash

This week I plucked a grey crop top from my wardrobe, put it on with a pair of trackie shorts to walk the dog, looked at myself in the mirror and declared: 

I hate this top.

And I did. I do. 

There have been two crop tops that have come with me from wardrobe to wardrobe for the past 3 years or so: said grey one and a black one. Both I hate.

The grey one is a halter neck, and is loose enough to be fairly comfortable but too saggy to be flattering. It does nothing for the shape of my boobs, which I thought was just because I forgo a bra with it, but I have since bought multiple tops that disprove this theory. It’s still with me because I thought it was one of those tops I could just ‘throw on’ - you know - casually. With anything. Except I don’t, or I would have realised sooner that I hate it.

The black one is outrageously tight, too tight to be comfortable, and my head always gets stuck in the neck whenever I manage to wiggle my way out of it. Its saving grace is its armpits. Great armpit cut. But unfortunately that doesn’t stop me feeling like a Frube whenever I’m wearing it. Which, of course, I don’t.

Now, I have downsized my wardrobe several times over the last few years.

Once when we moved from our own place into sharing with our wonderful, generous friends for the first of the COVID years. Once when I placed too large of an online clothes order during the second lockdown and felt I couldn’t possibly keep all the new things without donating some of my older things. And finally when we moved again from our own place into my partner’s parents’ house - where we are now. I don’t like to have too many things.

And yet these two crop tops made it through every cleanse, and I’m not sure why.

Hope maybe? Hope that I would become more svelte and yet also more luscious so feel compelled to expose more of myself. Hope that I might still be young enough to wear only crop tops, because that’s really all you can buy in regular shops now anyway. Hope that they might one day look great again.

So I doubled them up on the same hanger to save space and kept packing them. Kept giving them ‘one more summer to see if I wear them’.

Until this week, when I realised I don’t like them.

This was a radical thought to me.

It sounds ridiculous to type it out, but I genuinely thought it was my fault. I was getting too old, putting on too much weight, so the tops didn’t look as good as they could.

I thought black and grey went with everything so if the outfit wasn’t working it was me, not the top.

Me.

Except sometimes it’s the top.

This happened a second time this week, in an even more unsettling way.

I purchased Kayte’s (Simple & Season) offering The Cabin [you can take a look at her website but unfortunately entry is now closed to that particular thing], and the first exercise in the first workbook asked me “what do you desire to do?”.

I wrote my list gently, feeling into all the delicious things I might want for the future.

Create a garden. 

Build a retreat location.

Redesign forgotten spaces.

Go whale watching.

At the very top was my most automatic desire. The thing I have written on every single goals list and vision board since I was 10 years old. The thing I have yearned for, dreamt about, promised myself.

Write a book. 

These three words that have followed me around my entire life. 

I have been so closely tied to them, so utterly convinced that I needed to heed them, that I have let them beat me up and plague me with comparison and indecision. The first time I read Dolly Alderton’s wonderful book Everything I Know About Love, I cried because I hadn’t written it. I cried again watching it made into a TV series. It has come up repeatedly on coaching calls, as I’ve wondered if I’m untalented or just lazy. I have opened the book template on Pages and written a title and nothing else.

It has become such a core, unquestioned desire that I made it my fault that it had not yet come to fruition. If I hadn’t followed through, it was my fault. 

But the workbook question wasn’t over.

It also asked whether the desire felt expansive and true, or constrictive and stressful.

Now: Imagine. My. Surprise.

When I felt into the energy surrounding my desire to write a book, it wasn’t expansive at all. It may have been true, at some point. It might still be. But it far felt more constrictive and stressful than it did anything else.

I have no idea when this happened, because I know it used to feel expansive.

It used to feel like the most freedom I could imagine; the perfect job. But at some point, the guilt of carrying it from house to house without wearing it started to get a little heavy. Tie it down.

Perhaps it was the lofty expectations, or the imagined failure, or simply not knowing where to start or even what I wanted to write about. I’ve been through a million ideas: a personal essay/recipe book about how I used learning about food to deal with my Mum’s death. A part-fiction, part-truth exploration of love stories without endings, because we so rarely get the endings that literature and film portray. A self-help book on being fully human. An ACOTAR-style fantasy series. The list goes on, but they’re all whispers without real weight.

And so, for the time being, I have decided to set it down.

Maybe I won’t ever write a book.

It hurts a little bit, I’m not going to lie. This desire has been part of my identity for a really long time. I’m not 100% sure what to do without it.

But I am going to set it down, at least until it feels expansive again. It means much more than an ill-fitting crop top, so it’s not buried in the back of the wardrobe, awaiting a clothing collection bin, but I’ve taken it off the hanger.

And that actually does feel expansive.

Is there anything you’ve been holding on to for a little too long? Something that might feel good to admit that doesn’t feel good right now? I’m open to hearing it, if you’re willing to share in the comments.