My Wardrobe, Myself

Debriefing the Year of “Essential” – and What’s Next for 2019

Debbie Roes

January 24, 2019

It’s time for another 2018 wrap-up post! This one focuses on reviewing my theme for the year, “essential,” and reflecting on the various ways that it has impacted my life. I will also share the key word/theme I have selected for 2019 and my reasons for choosing it.

Since 2014, I have been selecting yearly themes that encapsulate primary focus areas for improving my life experience. These overarching themes often also highlight what I’m hoping to create in my emotional landscape. Choosing a word or theme for the year is generally a lot less overwhelming than writing out a long list of goals, but it can still be highly effective at moving our lives forward in a positive direction. If you’d like to read more about the practice of choosing a yearly word or would like guidance on selecting your 2019 word, the following articles can help:

“My One Word: Change Your Life with Just One Word” (Oneword.org)
“Tips for Choosing Your Word of the Year” (Mountain Modern Life)
“Choosing a Word to Define & Guide Your Year – 2019 Edition” (A Pair & a Spare)
“Find Your Word for 2019: 5-Day Course” (Susannah Conway)

Of course, you don’t need an e-course or to follow a specific process in order to find your word, but I’m including these resources for those who feel they could benefit from them. It’s perfectly fine to just go with whatever word intuitively stands out for you. That’s pretty much what I did this year, as I will share later in this post.

The Best of Full Life Reflections 2018

Debbie Roes

12 comments

January 9, 2019

Happy New Year! Now that 2019 has begun, I’d like to take some time to reflect back on the past year with a few retrospective posts. This first one focuses specifically on this blog, Full Life Reflections. I started the blog – my fifth! – on January 7, 2018, so it’s now a year old. While I haven’t posted as often as I’d hoped, I did publish 33 essays in 2018 on a variety of topics, from life balance and fulfillment to wardrobe management and gray hair transition.

Today, I’ll share the most popular posts from 2018, as well as my personal favorites (I did this each year of Recovering Shopaholic, too, and you can find those posts here). I will also highlight the most clicked outgoing links by visitors to the blog.

best of 2018

The 12 Most Popular Posts

The 12 posts below received the most traffic out of all of the articles I published during 2018. As you can see, the most popular topics were wardrobe management and gray hair transition. That was a bit surprising to me, but I guess it shouldn’t be, as those subjects (well mostly the first one…) are what I’m generally known for. I will continue to write about clothes and hair this year, as well as the other life topics I enjoy exploring. You can browse all of my articles by topic on the sidebar of every page on the site, and a full listing is available on the Article Archive.

Those who are new to Full Life Reflections will get a chance to check out the highlights of 2018, and longtime readers will have an opportunity to revisit posts they either missed the first time around or would like to explore again. I plan to re-read many of these essays myself, as I need reinforcement on some of the topics! The posts are listed in order of the traffic received, with the first one being the most popular by far (clearly a lot of people are interested in gray hair transition these days!). Included is a brief synopsis of what each article is about, along with updates in some instances.

On Wardrobe, Shopping, and Happiness

Debbie Roes

25 comments

December 28, 2018

Most of you became familiar with me through my writing on the subjects of shopping and wardrobe management on my former blog, Recovering Shopaholic. Although this blog doesn’t solely address these topics, they are still very much present in my mind, especially in recent months. While some people may think that what we wear is insignificant or frivolous, I would wholeheartedly disagree. I believe that personal style can have a large impact on how we feel about ourselves and how we interact with others. Likewise, how we feel about ourselves, our bodies, and our lives can significantly impact the way we dress and the things we buy. That is the focus of today’s post.

For a long time, I have envied those women who maintain minimalist wardrobes while also having a distinctive and resonant sense of personal style. I admire their decisiveness and clarity. They know what they like and what they feel good wearing. They generally have a commitment to simplicity and they value quality over quantity. This is how I want to be, but despite my continued exploration and work on myself and my wardrobe, I haven’t been able to make it happen. My wardrobe is still too large and I’m not always clear on what I like and the style statement I wish to express to the world.

Chaotic Mind, Chaotic Wardrobe

If your wardrobe is chaotic, perhaps it’s a reflection of a chaotic mind.

What I didn’t realize until recently is that the chaotic nature of my wardrobe and shopping is strongly related to the chaotic nature of my mind. That should have been self-evident to me a long time ago, but for some reason it wasn’t. I kept thinking that if I explored the topic of wardrobe management for a long enough time, I would eventually “get it” and be able to cultivate the type of workable wardrobe that I envy in others. This hasn’t happened and in fact, I have struggled so much in the past two years that I sometimes feel as if I’m almost back at square one. I know that isn’t actually the case, but it sure feels like it at times. My closet still feels too full and there is still a lot of duplication in there. It’s extremely frustrating and leads me to feel like a fraud, especially since I wrote two books offering advice to others about wardrobe management and smart shopping. I intellectually know the right things to do, but I don’t always do them!

Insights from My Fall Essential Wardrobe Challenge

Debbie Roes

12 comments

December 21, 2018

In my last post, I began a two part series (or maybe more…) on depression and anxiety and what we can do to experience a greater level of happiness and peace in our lives. I’m grateful to all those who responded to that post, either directly on the blog or via email. I continue to ponder these issues and will offer my own tips and those of others in an upcoming post. However, since I’m not ready to go with that quite yet, I’m going to write about something else that I’ve been thinking about.

For almost two months now, I’ve been doing a modified version of the “30 for 30” remix challenge. My reason for doing this was to shift my focus from what’s “out there” in the stores and online to what is already in my closet. Since this is the time of year when there’s a “big sale” seemingly every other day, it’s difficult for us recovering shopaholics not to get caught up in a major case of FOMO. I also got a lot out of doing a similar challenge back in April/May (see my recap here), so I thought it would be helpful for me to do an encore.

It can be helpful to challenge ourselves to dress with less for a period of time.

Essentials for Happiness and Peace, Part One

Debbie Roes

28 comments

November 30, 2018

This post has been in the works for a few weeks, but I have set it aside twice because what I was writing wasn’t adequately reflecting what I wanted to express. That’s part of the reason I went so long between debriefing my recent closet KonMari in late October and introducing my fall wardrobe challenge last week. I also haven’t had as much time to dedicate to the blog since I started my educational program in June, but I definitely don’t want to let it lapse as it’s still important to me. I like having an outlet to write about various topics and I enjoy interacting with readers and gaining new insights from what you share with me.

The reason I named this blog Full Life Reflections is because it’s an extension of what I was working towards with Recovering Shopaholic, which was to trade my full closet for a full life. Over the years of writing my previous blog and this one, I’ve learned that paring down a super-sized wardrobe is actually a lot easier than cultivating a full – and fulfilling – life. That’s not to say that the wardrobe part is easy because it’s not. I’m definitely still struggling with that, as my posts over the past few months show. Writing about my wardrobe foibles can be challenging and sometimes emotional as well, but today I want to write about something that’s much more sensitive and raw for me. I hope that what I share will be meaningful to some of you and will perhaps strike a chord in relation to the struggles you’re going through or have endured in the past.

A big challenge in life is finding our own place of inner calm amidst the noise and chaos.

Clothes and Shopping Aren’t the Real Problem

A lot of my issues with clothes, shopping, and wardrobe management have been distractions from my deeper life challenges. I came to understand this more fully in my third and fourth years of writing Recovering Shopaholic, and I started dipping my toe into the water of other topics at that time. But most of my readers seemed to be more interested in my wardrobe musings, so I mostly stuck to that subject since I didn’t want to disappoint people. As time went on, however, I found that I wasn’t enjoying blogging as much, so I decided to take a break, which ended up lasting almost a full year.