I’ve been thinking about Edith Wharton; writer, observer, denizen of the social set. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Also designer, decorator, and author of the treatise on interior design, ‘The Decoration of Houses’, an argument in favor of simplicity and balance. ⁣
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Simplicity and balance. ⁣
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This has been an interesting year. Or perhaps if I’m honest, it hasn’t been that interesting, and that has been challenging. Uncomfortable. I’ve confronted my sense of purpose, closing my shop, letting go of the accessories design and with it the doors I used to pass through regularly. And that has left me feeling as though I’m looking at a lot of closed doors. ⁣
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It’s trendy these days to talk of transformation. Scroll through your social media feed and notice how often that word pops up. I thought transformation was what I was doing, transforming into the next thing, the next iteration of my career. But today I cleaned out the card file. And now I’m not so sure.⁣
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Simplicity and balance. ⁣
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Do you have a card file? In my case, it’s a drawer. A drawer in my desk (antique, formerly my grandparent’s dining room table) filled with the collateral material of my career. There are my former business cards -- the one from when I managed the Buffalo Exchange on Telegraph Avenue, and the one from my first store, and then my second, my first interior design card, and then the one from when I had my lifestyle blog (thank you, faithful readers), along with the one from Bonnet. There are the cassette tapes from the ad stories I wrote, recorded by the local DJ. There’s the PR material I wrote for store openings and fashion shows. And the post-it note I wrote the synopsis of my master’s thesis on (and then decided that if the synopsis fit on a post-it perhaps it wasn’t worth writing). ⁣
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There are a lot of things that aren’t in this drawer. History that doesn’t end up on paper. In second grade, convincing my babysitter that we should spend the afternoon rearranging the apartment before my Mom got home from work, to make better use of the space. Saturday afternoons in the communal women’s dressing room at Lohmann’s department store, asking where this nice woman was planning to wear that outfit, and suggesting she try the jacket in a different size. Editing friends’ papers in high school, writing for the school paper, getting kicked out of the dorms as a freshman for wallpapering my side of the room… Things that don’t fit in the drawer.⁣
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I guess what I realized today is that transformation is not, actually, what I’m doing. I’ve always been a writer, and a designer, and a proponent of helping women feel confident. All at the same time. I’ve done these things in different ways, with varied success, but I have always done them, and always all at the same time. So maybe I need to stop thinking about transformation. Maybe what I’m really looking for is direction. ⁣
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So, in the New Year, the new decade, I will keep on doing these things that I do well until I discover, or perhaps realize, the direction forward. ⁣
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I wish you simplicity and balance, and direction this Holiday season. xo⁣
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