A Shift – Capsule Wardrobes, Minimalism, Living in the Grey Areas

Hello and Happy Monday! As you can probably tell from the title of this post, I’m feeling a change in the winds. Capsule Wardrobes have been a finicky mistress for me over the last 8 years of blogging… it’s what I started blogging about, and then when I felt like I could no longer do them perfectly I threw out the concept completely… then I reintroduced them here and there out of a sense of guilt and a feeling that I should be doing them since that’s how I started as a blogger. Convoluted much?

But the truth is, in recent years… this past year in particular, I’ve learned that it’s okay to live in the gray areas of life… to be okay with the happy mediums. It’s EASIER to live with rigid rules and expectations for myself (or at least it feels like it is) and it feels GOOD to know what my exact rules are, but life just simply doesn’t work like that does it? The thing is, Capsule Wardrobes, and the overarching concept of Minimalism deeply appeal to me, but in reality to do them exactly how I think I should is unrealistic… or to do them how I see someone else doing them is unrealistic. I have different goals, different interests, different abilities, etc. that make my pursuit of both things look very different than anyone else’s, and that should apply to everyone, but unfortunately social media tends to present a shiny uniform presentation of both that makes it look like you actually can achieve perfection.

What I’m trying to say is that lately my desire to pare things down has overridden my desire to be perfect in how I present things to you, and instead of sharing this capsule out of a sense of guilt I’m sharing it out of a real desire to minimize my wardrobe this month after feeling overwhelmed with my closet and out of touch with my style. What may surprise a lot of you is that I keep a pretty minimal closet as it is because I purge pretty regularly and give what I don’t want to family and friends, but I still felt like I had too many choices… too much input if you will. With my four kids home this summer, I just want getting dressed to be easy and it didn’t feel that way.

SO I decided to exist in those gray areas and not throw away all of my clothes, or go buy a whole new summer capsule wardrobe, or plan a full seasonal capsule wardrobe like I would have done 5 years ago. I decided to just do it for a month. I took 3/4 of my warm weather clothes and put them in a suitcase, tucked it away and I’ll be living with the rest for the month of July. I may swap some things out and continue into August, but we’ll see. I may not be feeling it by then… I’m allowing myself permission to change my mind.

And on that note (bare with me, I know this is getting long), I’m sure many of you long time readers have noticed that my heart hasn’t really been in blogging this past year. I LOVE writing and sharing with you, but I’ve just felt disconnected from my content. It 100% ties into what I mentioned above about having a desire to minimize and yet feeling stuck in a pattern of needing to share more, more, more with you guys.

That and my real hearts desire is just to write. To get it all out – I used to be more open on here but as my blog grew it became harder and harder to share because… gulp… suddenly I was sharing with a lot more people! But I want to get back to that. Although I’ve grown a lot and I have a better handle on what to share and what to keep private.

Anyway, all that to say… gray areas my friends. YES, there will still be style content because that’s something I still love, but it may just be a bit more organic with a little more story telling mixed in. I think that maybe I could bring you along on my journey to find quiet, peace, minimalism, etc. in the gray areas. What do you think?

I started this blog post with the intention of sharing my July capsule wardrobe with you guys, but I think I’m going to give this blog post standing room of its own. Come back tomorrow to see what I kept out of that aforementioned suitcase. 😉

Until next time,
Karin