What to Do With Clothes That Don't Fit Anymore

There is a standard you hold yourself to when you get dressed that you would never expect from another woman.

You know the one. It is what you say under your breath in the mirror on your way out the door, the assessment you make of your own body in a fitting room with bad lighting, the verdict you deliver every time you look at the clothes hanging in your closet that no longer fit you.

If your daughter said those exact words about herself, you would stop her before she got to the end of the sentence. You would tell her she is so much more than that, and you would mean every word of it. Then you would get up the next morning and say them to yourself again.

Today, we are talking about the standard sitting underneath the clothes, and the fact that it gets applied to exactly one woman on this earth. Before we get into it, here is the short version: your body is not the first thing that has to change. The standard is.

The year I hit the bottom of my own standard

After I had my son, I got back to my pre-pregnancy weight fairly quickly. That part matters because of what came next.

I nursed him until he was about eighteen months old. I was exercising consistently. I was eating well, and when I say eating well I mean an avocado and cottage cheese and strawberries for lunch. I was doing every single thing I had ever been told to do, and I was putting on weight anyway.

Every morning I walked into my closet and looked at beautiful clothes. Pieces I had chosen carefully, pieces that had fit me a year earlier and did not fit me now. I left all of it hanging right where it was, because I was going to get back into those clothes. That was the plan, and the plan was not up for discussion. So I put on the same sweatpants and the same t-shirt and went about my day feeling terrible about myself.

That went on longer than I want to admit. Then one day I was standing in that closet in those sweatpants, looking at all of it, and I started crying. That was the day I decided enough was enough.

What I did next was not complicated. I accepted that I was thirty-eight, that my body had shifted, that I was very likely heading into perimenopause, and that no amount of avocado and cottage cheese was going to argue with any of it. Then I went and bought beautiful clothes that fit the body I actually had. Everything changed after that.

The size on the tag stopped mattering, because I was in clothes that fit me well and let me walk out the door without dreading the mirror on the way. That shift did not stay in my closet either. It changed how I treated myself in general.

Notice what actually changed there. My body did what it was going to do and I had very little say in it. What changed was the standard I was measuring myself against, and the clothes hanging in that closet kept the old standard alive. Every morning, they got a vote and told me I was failing at something.

Why do you hold yourself to a standard you would never give another woman?

Women judge their own bodies and wardrobes by rules they would reject instantly if another woman applied those rules to herself. The double standard runs one direction only.

Say your daughter or your closest friend tells you she cannot fit into her size tens anymore, that she feels awful about herself, that she has never figured any of this out.

You would probably get a little angry, and not at her. You would tell her that a number printed on the inside of a piece of fabric has nothing to do with who she is. You would list everything she has built and handled and survived, and ask her how a size could compete with any of that. Then you would drive home and hold yourself to the exact thing you had just spent twenty minutes telling her was ridiculous.

We judge ourselves harder than we judge other women, we give ourselves less room, and we hand out grace freely to everyone except the woman in the mirror. That is a habit, not a character flaw, and it runs so deep that most women have never once heard it out loud.

Where does that standard actually come from?

The standard forms when your worth gets calculated by how well you meet everyone else's expectations. Getting dressed is the first thing to lose, because it is the only item on the list that is only for you.

You are the one your team looks to, the one your friends call when something falls apart, the one who remembers the appointments and the birthdays and which kid does not eat gluten. A lot of people need something from you, and most of them need it right now.

What happens over years of that is subtle. You start calculating your value based on what you are producing for other people, and once that math runs in the background, any morning you are not producing at full capacity becomes a morning you failed at something.

This is why so many women tell me they do not have time to think about what they wear. Most of the time it has very little to do with time. It is a ranking system where she put herself last so long ago that she does not remember deciding to.

My business coach wrote recently about being so deep in what she is building that she had stopped thinking about the earlier chapters of her life, the things she used to do that also made her who she is. She had narrowed herself down to the current chapter and forgotten the rest was still there.

That is the other half of what I mean when I say you are so much more than that. You are more than the role you happen to be performing best this year, more than the thing everyone currently needs from you, and certainly more than the number in the back of your jeans, which is the version of this that shows up in the closet every morning.

How do you hear your own standard from the outside?

Write down your real thoughts about your style in your own handwriting, walk away, then read them back as though your daughter wrote them about herself. Most women cannot finish that without something shifting.

This exercise takes about fifteen minutes and it is the part of this I want you to actually do.

1. Get a piece of paper. Not your phone. Paper and your own handwriting, because the handwriting matters for the second half.
2. Write down what you actually think about yourself when it comes to your style. What runs through your head standing in your closet at seven in the morning, or when you pull something on and take it right back off. Write it exactly as harsh as it sounds in your head. The cleaned-up version is the one you have been telling yourself is reasonable, and that is the version getting away with it.
3. Put the paper down and walk away for a few minutes.
4. Come back and read it again as though someone else wrote it. Your daughter, your niece, your sister, the woman you would defend without thinking twice. Read every line as though it came from her, about her.
5. Write your response, the way you would say it if she were sitting across the table from you and you needed her to hear it. Do not summarize and do not be polite about it. If you would push back, push back on paper.
6. Read your response back to yourself, because it was always for you.

What shifts in that exercise has nothing to do with anything I said here. It happens because she hears her own standard from the outside for the first time and it does not hold up. It never held up. It just never had to answer for itself before.

What should you do with clothes that don't fit anymore?

Remove them from your daily line of sight. Clothes that no longer fit your body, your life, or who you are today take up mental bandwidth and deliver a message every time you see them.

When I work with women, we do not keep pieces in the closet that do not fit. I mean that in three directions: your body, your lifestyle, and who you are as a woman today.

Those pieces make you feel a certain way about yourself every time you see them, and the message is usually that you are behind, or that you used to be better, or that you are waiting on your body before you are allowed to get dressed well.

The piece you are keeping for when things go back to normal is the loudest one in there. It functions as a daily reminder that the woman you are right now is a temporary situation you are trying to get out of. Life is too short to spend years getting dressed in front of an audience of clothes that are voting against you.

Does your body have to change before your style can?

No. Your body is the thing you have the least control over, especially in this decade. Your thinking, your decisions, and what hangs in your closet all respond immediately.

I did everything correctly and my body did what it wanted anyway, and the years I spent treating that as a personal failure are years I do not get back. When the body is not responding, change the things that will respond. Change the standard, change the clothes, and change what you agree to look at every morning.

None of this requires you to feel a certain way about your body first. I did not arrive at acceptance and then go shopping. I went shopping because I was tired of crying in sweatpants, and the feelings caught up afterward. If you are waiting until you have made peace with all of it, you will be waiting a long time, and every morning of that wait costs you something.

When you catch yourself holding a standard you would never hand to your daughter, treat that as your signal. You are so much more than that. You have always been so much more than that. The only woman who has not been told is you.

If you are reading this and thinking that you do not know what your style is anymore, or that you have been in the same rut for years, that is exactly what The Elevae Experience® is built for. It gets into what makes style personal to you specifically: your body, your proportions, your coloring, your lifestyle, your style personality, and your vision for how you want to show up. The first module opens with vision and mindset work on purpose, because the standard has to move before the wardrobe can. You can put a woman in the right clothes, and if she is still holding herself to something she would never hand to her daughter, she will find a way to feel behind in them.

Do the exercise first. Paper, your handwriting, and her face in your mind when you read it back.

You can learn more about The Elevae Experience® here.