Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to say goodbye to most of the clothes in my closet. To beige. To ivory. To every muted colored piece of clothing which is actually every colored piece of clothing because, for many years, I have not bought any color unless it is muted. All these pieces lived a good life, but—in a surprising plot twist—they’re dead to me.
As I write these words, I am wearing a hot pink shirt I picked up at a thrift store the other day. Yesterday I wore a royal blue sweater. A few days from now, I will click “Buy Now” on a pair of glasses with both purple and teal in the frames. Who am I? How did I get here?
This isn’t really a story with a clear beginning or end, but I think the best place to start is Tuesday, February 28th at 10:00 a.m.
I am in my friend Andrea’s front room and she is covering me with scarves of various colors. Each time she takes one away or replaces a different tone, she looks closely at my skin and face and eyes. She gasps periodically and says, “Did you see that?!” (Answer: Never as clearly as she always does.) She’s trying to figure out which colors are best for me and it doesn’t take her long to reach a verdict: A clear color code which mostly includes primary colors. Bright blues. Bright pink. Red. Green. Many different shades of purple. Black, white, and charcoal gray are—thank God—included, but I can’t stop laughing about the fate of the rest of the clothes in my closet which are apparently, all wrong. I literally laugh for an entire day and text all my friends who also laugh and respond with skull emojis and the same sentence: What are you going to do?
I wore a muted orange sort of rusty crewneck to Andrea’s house—probably the brightest colored shirt I own—and every time she takes a “good color” scarf off me and leaves me with Old Rusty, I see the bags return under my eyes like some kind of mean magic trick. She makes a believer out of me right there (and also when she teaches me how to use under eye concealer, but that’s a story for another day).
She also asks me a question which I pocket and think about in the days that follow: Why do you think you took all the color out of your wardrobe?
I wasn’t always so beigey. When I was sixteen, I wore a metallic-sheened pink dress to prom. The following year, I picked out a yellow shirt to wear underneath overalls for my senior pictures. I once bought a bright green pea coat in college and even chose navy bridesmaid dresses for our wedding which I paired with bright pink gerbera daisies. I have not always been color-averse. At some point, my allegiance changed to neutrals.
But why? This is the question I’ve been asking.
There might be something here. I think I made gray, tan, and the occasional matte pink my official brand sometime in the last ten years which puts it somewhere in the span of time that motherhood entered the scene. But also, there was a cross-country move in there and four years of residency and a global pandemic to round out what was an already incredibly difficult stretch of time. (It honestly takes my breath away a little to consider all we have lived in the last 10 years.) Maybe somewhere in the midst of it all, I made a choice to blend in with the walls? Maybe it was just one less thing to worry about?
Here’s what I think the more I think about it: I don’t think ‘the why’ really matters.
A few weeks ago, I was given some new information about which colors look best on me. I could use that information to dig deep into the past of my psyche, or I can simply take what I know now and use it to move forward.1 I can recognize that there’s a place for uncovering important pieces of the past and also that sometimes it’s okay to just start where you are.
So that’s where I’m at. I feel a little like Dorothy stepping foot into Oz for the first time—out of beige and tan and right into technicolor.2 But how I got here doesn’t matter to me as much as where the yellow brick road takes me from this moment in time.
It feels more fun this way.
To be clear, “My Colors” are filed in a folder of fairly unimportant and/or silly things that I still like to think about and enjoy. The lesson here feels deeper than a color analysis.
Odds are still high that I’ll be wearing gray or black the next time you see me. And I’m keeping Old Rusty. She’s so soft and perfectly worn in.
I mean I’m a little bit speechless at this, as I’ve come to think of you as my gray and beige spirit sister 😉 But really, the blue WORKS, friend. And I love this whole piece.
I think it scares me to find out “my colors” for this reason exactly. I’m just not ready to say bye to my muted wardrobe 😂
I loved this piece Molly!