I usually feel a pang of regret as I wave goodbye to the holiday season, like it came and went before I could fully celebrate. But I don’t feel that this year, maybe because I put my tree up before Thanksgiving, and I’ll admit I’m looking forward to spending the upcoming month working, journaling, running and drinking mocktails, greeting the routine of everyday life (which is sporting a New Year-inspired healthy glow) with a tight, warm hug.
I wish I could share well-lit photos of sparkly, festive holiday outfits with you, but most of the photos I took over the past month have been in dark, shitty lighting in my dusty mirror. (You know it’s been a whirlwind if I don’t even stop for a fit pic.) The best fit pics I took were not of my own outfits, for I’ve been completely outshone by two stone lions outside of a house in Buffalo who are donned in the best Christmas outfit (left) and NYE get-up (right) that I’ve seen so far.
I’ve been finding outfit inspiration in even weirder places, too, like in the stained glass wall hangings I made this year with my dad as gifts for my friends and family. I went through his collection of glass from estate sales, cutting it into shapes and making designs, finding myself fascinated for the millionth time this year by color combinations. Imagine a look — maybe silky wide-legged pants with a textured wool top and suede heels — in shades of orange juice, pimento cheese, maraschino cherry and midnight blue, as pictured in the glass object in the middle. One sartorial resolution of mine is to pay more attention to color. There lies a treasure chest waiting to be opened.
“I hope you're wearing something you're proud of, and if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to go back and change,” - This will make sense in a second.
There’s a meme, set to a song by The Smiths, that encapsulates how I felt about a lot of last year. It says, “Me when I’m flopping so hard that I have to go on a long walk and have a meeting with myself to figure out how I’m going to rebrand my life.”
It was the Year of the Walk for me, as I spent hours and hours, all counted in steps, trying to figure out the direction in which to steer my life. I always thought I was incredibly decisive, but I started to wonder this year if my decisiveness wasn’t just impatience wearing a nice sweater.
Of course, the new calendar year triggered this reflection, but I’ve been feeling for a while like all of the walking and thinking has culminated in making decisions that I feel proud of and finding the strength to see them through. As I was doing some New Year-prompted journaling, I settled on my intention for 2024: Work. I spent the last year in a sort of “wintering” phase, to borrow author Katherine May’s terminology, still working but also spending a lot of time reflecting and exploring my priorities, interests, skills and weaknesses.
I reassessed a lot of my favorite nuggets of wisdom, from the idea of blooming where you’re planted to the pressure to choose a fig from the fig tree of life because indecision causes all of the figs, or potential life paths, to all shrivel up and die. (The influence that Sylvia Plath passage has had on me, I swear!)
Then I remembered a funny thing I did when I was 17, choosing a quote to accompany my portrait in the high school yearbook. It was early Pinterest days and I was BIG into pinning quotes written in typewriter font (you know the kind) and I settled on a quote with the intention of it being a warning to my future self. I thought that if I were ever to look back at my high school year book wistfully (hilarious because there’s no chance of that lol), then I would be in desperate need of this advice: “I hope you life a life you’re proud of, and if find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” And so I walked and I thought… Am I proud? What makes me proud?
I’ve also been thinking a lot lately of another quote: Newton’s Third Law of Motion. “For every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” I don’t really know what that means in physics, but it certainly applies to my experience of life so far. There’s a down for every up, more or less, and nature demands a break for every productive period. The laws of society doesn’t let those breaks be equal, but reactions must follow actions, and this was the Year of the Walk and Reaction.
If you’re the kind of person who records snippets of your life — I know not all of us are cursed with a need to grab the phone and take a picture or video of everything all the time — then I suggest stitching together a montage of your year. Though I have things I want to do differently in the future, I felt an overwhelming wave of gratitude for my friends, family and myself when I watched my year recapped in little videos. I did all that! I lived another year.
In reading the thoughtful year-end reflections of many Substack fashion writers, I’ve noticed a lot of vows to buy less and appreciate what we already own, and I completely agree. It’s time to enjoy the fruits of our labor! More styling what we own and less buying the next perfect thing that makes everything else makes sense. It’s a mirage, so let’s eat our tangerines and persimmon.
Thanks for reading! xx
Francesca 🍊
This post - and your writing - so lovely. Even though I’m guessing that I am a good couple decades older than you, this really resonates.
Here’s to enjoying the walk, the reaction and the fruits of our labor!