How to give yourself permission

Have you ever pulled something out of your closet and suddenly been transported back to a completely different version of yourself?

Maybe it was an old t-shirt or pair of jeans that revealed exactly the type of person you were when you wore it–what you believed, how you carried yourself, what you wished for.

That happened to me this week.

After years of putting it off, I finally hired a stylist to help me clean out my closet. This wasn’t any regular closet cleanout. She had me try on every single piece of clothing that I own.

I thought it was going to be a fun afternoon trying things on. It turned out to be one of the most therapeutic things I’ve ever done.

Because what I found was that every single item had a story. The dress I bought twenty-five years ago for an event I don’t even remember. The blazer I never wore but kept because someone important bought it for me. The jeans that fit a body I don’t have anymore. The skirt I never wore because I didn’t feel like I was allowed to. The old clothes I held onto because getting rid of them felt like letting go of part of myself. It was a lot to take in.

And then, I put on a dress.

It was the dress I wore on the cover of the first book I ever wrote, the one about relationships that I published while I was still married to my first husband. I hadn’t worn it in ages, but the second I zipped it up I felt exactly like the woman who wore it all those years back. The woman who was performing, trying to look like she had it all figured out. The good girl who didn’t want to be a problem yet and had no idea how much life was about to teach her.

Standing there in the mirror in that black dress, I started talking to her. I told her I was sorry, that I was proud of her, and that I was going to keep going for both of us.

The next day, I headed to the podcast studio to sit down with Jamie Lynn Sigler.

Jamie was diagnosed with MS at twenty years old, in the middle of filming The Sopranos, and hid it from almost everyone in her life for fifteen years because she had been conditioned, the way most of us were, to be the good girl. To not be a problem. To carry the heavy thing in silence and call it strength.

She said something to me in our conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She told me the first step in any of this is forgiving yourself. Not the people who hurt you, not the world that taught us all of this, but yourself. The woman who was just doing the best she could with what she had.

That’s the woman I was talking to in the dress.

If you have someone like her living in your closet, in your photo album, or in the back of your mind somewhere, I think you will love this conversation. It is Jamie Lynn Sigler: How to Forgive Yourself and Rewrite Your Story, and it is live now wherever you listen.

Go easy on her this week. Whoever she is.

🧡Tamsen

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