“Embrace what you have been given,” Anne Hathaway shared on Instagram this week.
Who hasn’t stood in front of their closet, muttering under their breath about the pants, shirts, and dresses that seem to have shrunk overnight? Hathaway’s candid take on weight gain and clothing that no longer fits is something we can all relate to.
The Oscar-winning star posted a photo of an old pair of jeans she was transforming into shorts. “There’s no shame in finally breaking down and making your own jean shorts because last summer’s are just too dang short for this summer’s thighs,” she captioned. Preach it, sister! Plus, you get to show off your DIY skills—talk about a double win!
We all know the struggle. My bedroom floor is often a minefield of clothes that are just a smidge too snug, and that’s after I bravely parted ways with boxes of ill-fitted garments during our last move. My partner insisted on holding onto clothing that didn’t fit, only for us to haul them across the country and eventually donate them to Goodwill.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule on when to declutter your wardrobe, but it’s easy to see why someone would want to get ahead of the game. Those favorite jeans from before the kids, or that beloved dress from our twenties, can stir up sweet memories, but often they just serve as painful reminders of the past. An outdated wardrobe can keep us fixated on who we used to be—before the kiddos, before the marriage, and before the inevitable aging. Psychologists agree that dwelling on the past can lead to some not-so-great feelings.
A recent article by Lucy Martinez on Buzzfeed perfectly encapsulates this experience. She wrote, “I was beginning every single day with a terrible task—facing a closet that told me my body wasn’t right, and choosing which way I’d like to be made physically uncomfortable that day. My clothes were undoing years of work toward accepting my body as-is.” So, she made the empowered choice to purge her closet and create a wardrobe that reflected her current self. “If you open your closet and realize things are no longer fitting you, you don’t have to assign it any emotional significance,” she noted. “You haven’t failed. Just buy some new clothes or tailor what you have. Trust me, it’s not a big deal, and you’ll wish you’d done it sooner.”
Letting go of clothes from our slimmer days isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Holding onto them can reinforce the misguided idea that our worth is tied to a number on the scale, which is total nonsense. We were fabulous then, and we’re fabulous now.
Hathaway’s message resonates deeply: “Bodies change. Bodies grow. Bodies shrink. It’s all love,” she wrote. “Love what you have been given.”
This article was originally published on Aug. 9, 2016.
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In summary, Anne Hathaway’s Instagram post is a refreshing reminder that our bodies are constantly evolving and that embracing change is key. Instead of clinging to outdated notions of ourselves, we can celebrate our present selves and move forward with love and acceptance.