My Style Journey, Turning 40, and Settling In

I started this post a couple of weeks ago, but then spring break happened, a snow day happened, preschool spring break happened, and then travel for Easter… so not a lot got checked off my to do list, least of all a blog post that requires some thought and attention.

But I’m glad life hit pause on this post because 2 weeks ago I planned on taking it in a completely different direction than I do after two weeks of rumination. Perhaps there’s a life lesson there, but that’s a rabbit trail for another day…

Somewhere in all of the busyness of the last few weeks I turned the big 4-0, which has caused some existential… feelings ha! Maybe not in the way you think either – I remember my parents turning 40 and having a big “over the hill” birthday bash and thinking they were SO old. And now that I’ve reached the same milestone I feel so NOT old, but also SO old all at the same time. I often feel like I should be choosing which soda to get from the vending machine in between classes (yes, we used to be able to have soda machines in school 😉) instead of which dosage and combination of meds my kids should be on. But my body feels very much like it just turned 40 😆. It’s an odd juxtaposed way of thinking, but it’s there nonetheless.

A good friend asked me recently how I felt about turning 40 and it caught me a little off guard because I had thought a lot about it, but I hadn’t actually felt much about it. I always had an idea of how I would feel going into my 4th decade, but I couldn’t have predicted the years preceding that milestone.

So now that it’s finally come and gone, I realize I feel good about it. The last years have brought so much upheaval and uncertainty, but this last year has brought some much needed clarity, answers, and solutions that are working (I could weep just thinking about how good it feels to be able to type that).

My 4th decade feels like a fresh start… not a chance to start over, but a new opportunity to move forward with a peace of mind that hasn’t been present in my 3rd decade. For the first time in a long time I feel good about where we are at and I’m not taking that for granted.

No things aren’t perfect. Perimenopause continues to be a massive challenge for me, my fibromyalgia acts up regularly, and there’s always the ADHD thing to contend with. And that’s on top of managing the day to day life of a mom of 3 (probably 4) neurodivergent children. But as they say, knowledge is power and I have a lot of knowledge I can now rely on.

So how does this relate to my style journey? Well my style has changed with me and because I put so much emotion into my dressing you can actually see my life journey reflected by my style journey.

Let me show you what I mean:

High School (1998-2002):

My dad moved us from our home in St. Louis to a town of 600 people when I was 13 and I thought my life was over. If you’ve ever transplanted into a small town you know it can be really hard to find your place since most of the people living there have been there since they were born. My style reflects my desire to fit in and even better? Fade into the background and hide the fact that my family didn’t have enough money to buy anything even remotely close to the Doc Martens that were so cool.

Undergrad (2002-2007):

I did a complete 180 in college. For the first time, I felt like I could be whoever I wanted to, which was largely based in the fact that my college was big enough for lots of different types of people. I didn’t feel so much like a transplant or that I needed to fit in to be accepted and… I discovered thrifting. All of this combined into a very “unique” 😆 sense of style that I felt good about. I also really thrived academically and socially in my undergrad (a first for me), and it massively improved my mental health… the freedom I felt in expressing myself through my outfits is a testament to that.

Post college (2007-2009):

There was a progression that happened in my post college years. I felt really lost… my best friend and I had a massive falling out that we never recovered from and a lot of my friends hadn’t graduated yet so I felt like I was instantly cut off from my community. On top of that I was in a really toxic living environment so I would come home from my 9-5 and hide in my bedroom all night. David and I did start dating during this time so there was that bright spot, but my mental health hit a really big low and my style went from free and expressive to wanting to be as cookie cutter “pretty” as possible.

Master’s Degree Years: (2010-2013):

My style was ALL over the place in these years… it reflected the inner turmoil I was going through in my faith. David and I had been going to a very charismatic church since 2007 and I entered a graduate program to get my Master’s in Theology. It was this weird time of figuring out exactly what it was that I believed because the church I grew up with was a fundamentalist church with heavy influence from Bill Gothard. So basically I had experienced two wildly different forms of American Christianity and my graduate degree was showing me a much more balanced and scientifically sound way of viewing my faith that was so, so compelling. I was also helping to lead a women’s ministry and being trained to be one of the Children’s Pastors at the church we were attending and through that process saw a very ugly side of that church that led to David and I leaving. My style reflects a lot of the back and forth shifts I was going through in my faith – I swung back and forth between cookie cutter, trying to adopt a more expressive way of dressing, and doing the whole hipster academic thing.

2014 blip:

In 2014 David and I made a somewhat impulsive decision to spend a month in Europe. I had just graduated with my Master’s degree, and a lot of my confidence had returned with it. I graduated with a 4.0 and for the first time had realized that I was intellectually capable. We had also found a church (the same one we’re at now) that supported a lot of the new ideas I had come to believe and we were starting to find a community there. We knew we wanted to start a family so as a last hurrah we booked a trip to Ireland (Dublin and Gallway), England (Bath and London), Paris, and Italy (Rome, Florence, and Milan). It was the BEST thing. I really found myself on that trip and with my newfound confidence in myself and the joy of visiting places I had wanted to visit for so long my style 100% reflected that. In fact there is a lot of crossover between my style then and my style now.

The mom of 1 years (2015-2017):

When I think about my time as a mom of one, I have very fuzzy, happy feelings. Kit was a really easy baby, and for the first time I didn’t have to sit in an office for 9 hours a day (my ADHD brain rejoiced!). I also found Caroline of Unfancy and became obsessed with the idea of creating a capsule wardrobe for myself… enter Truncation. I started blogging about Capsule Wardrobes under the name Truncation during this time and it was the perfect thing to transition me from full time work to staying at home. BUT I was so inspired by Caroline that I found it hard to seperate how I wanted to dress vs. just copying and pasting her outfits… all with very little budge on a single income.

The mom of 3 years (2017-2019):

And then came the twin years. I love my girls with all of my heart and I wouldn’t change a single thing, except the lingering fear of receiving help for mental health from professionals and medication. I suffered from pretty extreme postpartum anxiety that was exasperated by PTSD after they were born. Twins do not run in either of our families so I had barely recovered from the shock of finding out I was pregnant with them before I was thrust into the craziness of a twin pregnancy and early delivery. I was not at all mentally prepared for what it would look like to have an early birth and extended NICU stay. It left me in a really dark place that it took years to climb out of, a lot of which I still don’t remember. I don’t even really remember what drove my style choices during this time except for the emerging world of slow fashion which ended up being the worst thing for me at the time. From a very unbalanced emotional state I adopted an ethics wardrobe perspective and then in my ADHD exasperated state became obsessed with getting it right, while at the same time being incredibly hard on myself for not being able to on a single income… all while dealing with mental health issues that were far beyond my ability to manage. I know a LOT of my outfit photos from these years circulate on Pinterest, but whenever I see those photos I don’t even feel like I’m looking at myself. Nothing about the outfits or the person feel like me.

The mom of 4 years (2019-2020):

Gabe was healing. I was SO torn up about whether or not to have another baby. Part of me felt like it would be crazy to add another child to the mix, but another part of me wanted a do-over (and felt incredibly guilty for feeling that way). So when our little oopsie baby came along I was really happy… I felt like things had been decided for me and it took a huge load off of my chest. He also was my healthiest baby in utero, I had no “conditions” with him like I did with the girls (preeclampsia with Kit and Gestational Diabetes with the twins) and for the first time I got to hold my baby for as long as I wanted after he was born. I remember laying in the delivery room while snuggling him close and thinking he had healed a part of my heart that I thought would never recover. And for the first time in a long while, I started wearing what I wanted again. I wasn’t trying to fit in to a small social group, a capsule wardrobe or ethical fashion community online… I allowed myself to wear the things I wanted and not surprisingly my style started to evolve into the more “cool business casual” style that I’ve adopted in recent years.

The Covid years (2020-2022):

But then Covid happened. I went from being blissfully happy with a newborn who, for the first time, had no medical vulnerabilities to the complete opposite. We were supposed to celebrate my birthday at our community center’s pool the weekend that everything shut down and we all know what happened after that. I found myself struggling to grieve the losses my kids were experiencing over and over again while also trying to pick up the new responsibilities of being their teacher too. It was also during this time that Kit really started showing signs of ADHD so on top of everything that was going on I suddenly found myself feeling like the absolute worst mom ever because her behaviors were so far out of my ability to parent. And that turmoil is absolutely reflected in my style during that time. I thought I could find solace from once again fitting in with the ethical fashion community and pursued that world with abandon at the expense of my own personal style and our budget. I like a lot of the outfits I styled during those years, but they still didn’t feel like me… and while I see more of myself in those Pinterest photos, I still don’t feel a connection with any of those outfits. And then because I knew it wasn’t me, I completely shifted to trying to be the LTK poster child because my blog actually started to become profitable for me at that time and I was just wearing and showing what the LTK creator app said were top sellers… and I made a lot of money doing it.

2023:

Things started to shift at the beginning of 2023. We finally had answers – we knew the girls had ADHD and we’d been seeing their therapist long enough that I confidently knew that I was a really good mom. I also had tools to parent them for the first time in their lives and we were starting to pursue medication which was beginning to have a really positive impact for them. I also got diagnosed myself with ADHD and started taking medication that has made my symptoms so much easier to manage. And my style once again started to shift towards what I truly like and feel comfortable in. I always think I got my sense of style from my Grandma who was always just a little more glam than everyone around her. In 2023 I started to lean into my tendency to be a bit more dressed up than anyone else and I stopped trying to fit in. I stopped looking to others for inspiration and instead focused on only choosing things I truly liked. I also stopped working as hard as a blogger because I entered 2023 with some pretty massive burnout. I made the decision to step away from how much I was working to instead focus on being there for the girls with their ever growing appointment schedule and need for behavioral support. I sacrificed making the income I had been making, but I don’t regret it for even two seconds. Not only did my mental health drastically improve, but I was able to take a step back from the consumerism I was promoting through my quest to be the perfect LTK girly and reconsider what was actually important to me.

2024:

And that brings us to today – to the 40 year old version of myself. The 40 year old version who still has a ton of work to do, but who now has tools like medication, lifestyle changes and intense therapy at her disposal. A 40 year old who knows what she likes and dresses for no one but herself… who still likes to shop and share her finds, but who’s learning how to keep it in budget and not encourage others to excess either. And now I’ll stop talking in third person because that person is me. 😛 I’ve learned a lot over the last 4 decades… I feel sometimes like my brain can’t handle an ounce more change or shift in my environment, but I know that no matter what I’ve proven to be adaptable and I will continue to do so as I walk forward into the next 40 decades. The biggest thing I’ve learned from all of this is that it’s okay to be messy. It’s okay to be all over the place, and to not have it figured out. Being a work in progress is a beautiful thing that you should never feel ashamed to be. And that, my friends, is why aging is something to be desired and not feared. No, I’m not sad to be turning 40. I’m proud of it. I’m proud of what I’ve done and learned and I would never want to be in a place where those lessons had not been learned.

So cheers to aging. May we all approach it with eagerness and grace.

Until next time,

Karin

P.S. if you want to follow along with my current style journey you can always find me here or on my LTK where I’m very decidedly not being the perfect LTK girly.