Nobody announces the last time you wear the pinstripes.

Once upon a time, I had a white suit with blue pinstripes that I was not even a little embarrassed to wear despite the fact that I felt like this was a suit for someone who worked at the circus.

If the ringmaster was glamorous.

 
This suit became known far and wide as my Circus Suit. It was legendary.

When I walked into a deposition wearing it, the court reporter would smile at me with her eyebrows.

Men in elevators stood up straighter.

I was taller. I was funnier. And my oral arguments were winning-er.

 
There must’ve been a last time I wore the Circus Suit.

But I couldn’t tell you when it was.

Nobody announced it.

Nobody said, “This is the last time you will wear the pinstripes.”
 
Because that’s how these things happen.

You don’t wear it this week.

One week becomes another.

Then another.

And before you know it, Young Lawyer Vivian has quietly moved out, and the Circus Suit is still hanging in the closet, waiting for someone who isn’t coming back.

 
Everyone I’ve ever stood in a closet with has had a Circus Suit.

Sometimes it looks like a pair of running shoes that haven’t seen a treadmill since they spent a week in bed with the flu 3 years ago. And then started doing yoga. And then decided maybe they were a walker now because of a creaky knee situation.

Sometimes it looks like a baby swing that hasn’t swung in decades.

Or a bread machine that made fresh bread every week for years, until they went on Atkins for a summer in 2014 and forgot that it existed.

Or a bunch of plastic bags containing the softest yarn and all the patterns for sweaters and hats and baby blankets that they wanted to spend time working on in the evenings, but nobody has that much time in the evenings and their life moved past it.

 
These things might look like simple, random objects sitting on a shelf.

But they’re not simple at all. Or random.

Once upon a time, they belonged to a runner. A new mom. A knitter. A woman who didn’t think twice about eating bread.

Those things are still on the shelf because they belonged to a life you were living.

When that life quietly moved on.

The stuff didn’t.

 
This is not stuff that you brought into your home one day and put on a shelf and forgot about it. It’s stuff you were using. All the time. Because it made your life function.

But life changes. We evolve. We move on to the next chapter.

And it hardly ever happens overnight.

Sometimes life moves on so quietly that you don’t notice it’s moved on.

Sometimes you don’t realize a past version of you doesn’t live here anymore until you open the hall closet on a Tuesday night looking for batteries and find her stuff sitting on a shelf.

Sometimes when you’re decluttering that closet, you pick up your hydration vest that always made you feel like an octopus was on your back and instead of dropping it in a donation bag you find yourself saying,

“Ohhhh, I remember her.”

Because of course you do.

She is you.

And she is also … not.

 
Which is why getting rid of these things feels different than getting rid of an extra spatula.

You’re not deciding what to do with an object.

You’re deciding how much of your home you want to share with people who haven’t lived there in years.

You’re deciding how much space Newlywed You gets to take up in your home, with her 12 place settings of china she used for one dinner party back in 2003.

Because she’s not moving back in.

And the only thing harder than that is figuring out how to actually smile with your eyebrows.

 
Your friend who can’t believe she does not have even one picture of herself in the Circus Suit,
Vivian