Full Life Reflections

Spring “Essential Wardrobe” Challenge Recap

Debbie Roes

May 18, 2018

At the beginning of April, I took on a wardrobe challenge to help me better understand what an “essential wardrobe” is for me and how I can reach that desired goal. My April 6^th post outlines the specifics of the challenge, which I completed this week, but here’s a brief synopsis:

My challenge was a modified version of the “30 for 30 Remix,” originally created by Kendi Skeen of the blog Kendi Everyday.
I set out to create two 30-piece capsules, one for my “out and about” wardrobe and one for my at-home wardrobe. However, instead of selecting my capsule pieces before starting the challenge, I built the capsules organically as I went along.
As I wore closet pieces, I added them to the appropriate lists and continued on until I reached roughly 30 items in each capsule. I also cordoned off two distinct sections in my closet to contain my two “30 for 30” capsules.
The challenge continued until I wore 30 “out and about” outfits. I originally thought I would just do 20 outfits because I only wear such ensembles three or four days a week, but I ultimately decided to honor the spirit of the challenge and continue on until I reached thirty.
During the course of the challenge, I tracked how often I wore the items in both of my capsules, as well as captured notes about my outfits and how I felt wearing them (sort of like the “outfit journal” I kept for three years).

On Wednesday, I wore my 30^th “out and about” outfit, so it took me roughly a month and a half to finish the challenge. While that may seem like a long time, I know it would have been at least a week or two longer had I not taken a ten-day trip to Lake Tahoe, during which I wore “out and about” outfits every day but one. In today’s post, I’ll share information about my wardrobe capsules, some wear statistics, and what I learned from taking on the challenge.

The Capsules

Here’s a snapshot of my two wardrobe capsules hanging up in my closet. The “out and about” capsule is on the left and the at-home capsule starts with the light green t-shirt to the right of the pants. Coats, jackets, and sleepwear items are not shown in this picture, but many of those pieces are included in the other images below.

30 for 30 capsules

Forgiveness, Part Two: How to Forgive

Debbie Roes

9 comments

May 11, 2018

In my last post, I wrote about the three different types of forgiveness – exoneration, forbearance, and release – and the situations to which they apply. Today, I’m going to expand further upon the topic of forgiveness with some tips and strategies for how to best forgive those who have wronged us. These suggestions will primarily apply to the third – and often the most challenging – type of forgiveness, release. Release is the lowest form of forgiveness and generally relates to situations in which the offender has never acknowledged wrongdoing or apologized for their behavior.

“I never knew how strong I was until I had to forgive someone who was not sorry.” ~ Unknown

Most of the concepts and tips mentioned in this post were derived from a podcast from The Savvy Psychologist, titled “5 Ways to Forgive People (Even Those Who Don’t Apologize),” as well as an article from Greater Good Magazine, titled “What is Forgiveness?” Other helpful resources on the topic of forgiveness are included at the end of this post and some relevant quotes (from this article) are peppered throughout as well.

Why Forgive?

One of the reasons it can be so difficult to forgive is that it feels like forgiving means excusing the wrongdoing or forgetting it ever happened. However, if we hang on to old hurts for a long period of time, it can result in tremendous suffering that only serves to compound the initial injury we experienced. While the pain of being hurt by others is an inevitable part of life, the suffering caused by holding a grudge and ruminating on past offenses is optional.

how to forgive

On Forgiveness: The Three Types and When They Apply

Debbie Roes

6 comments

April 26, 2018

After a few posts on body image, wardrobe management, and transitioning to gray hair, it’s time to switch gears and pivot back to the realm of personal relationships. In the next two posts, I’m going to cover a difficult topic when it comes to relating to others: forgiveness. I wrote about that subject a few times on my first blog (this one is number five!), The Healing Project, back in 2010. If you’d like to read those essays, they are archived HERE.

In today’s post, I highlight what forgiveness is and why we should endeavor to do it. I also summarize the three different types of forgiveness and the situations to which they apply. This information comes from an excellent video from Prager University, featuring psychiatrist Steven Marmer. I’ve also heard Dr. Marmer interviewed on this topic and found his ideas on forgiveness both interesting and helpful. While you can certainly watch the video on your own and learn the information, I hope my summary will enable you to better internalize the concepts. I have watched the video probably ten times at this point, but writing this blog post deepened my comprehension of the material considerably. My next post will offer guidance on how to more easily forgive those who have wronged you.

three types of forgiveness

What is Forgiveness?

Psychologists define forgiveness as a deliberate decision to release feelings of anger, resentment, or vengeance toward someone who has hurt you. In contrast, “unforgiveness” is marked by a mix of bitterness, hostility, anger, and fear. Holding a grudge or aiming for revenge can sap our ability to find peace and happiness, but finding a way to forgive without giving up our principles is no easy task. However, if we can find a way to do so, we will reap many benefits. Studies have found that those who score higher on measures of forgiveness are less depressed, sleep better, use less medicine, have more energy, and enjoy improved cardiovascular health and better life satisfaction.

Gray Hair Transition – Don’t Do What I Did!

Debbie Roes

31 comments

April 20, 2018

It’s been well over a year since I last gave an update on my gray hair transition process. Although I was on a blogging hiatus for ten months during that time frame, I wasn’t in a hurry to address this topic once I started up this new blog. In truth, I have been dreading writing this post. No, I haven’t gone back to coloring my hair every four weeks like before, but I have made many mistakes along the way. At first, I wasn’t going to write about this at all and I even considered deleting my previous gray hair transition posts. However, I ultimately decided to write this difficult update in the hope that I might potentially save even one woman from going through what I have.

do's and don'ts for gray hair transition

I have done more don’ts that do’s during my gray hair transition…

I’m publishing this post on the two-year anniversary of the last time I colored my roots. I should be done or almost done with the transition process by this time (hair grows an average of half an inch per month), but I’m not. The reason I’m not done transitioning stems from my not being in the right headspace to take on this journey in the first place. I wasn’t ready to fully embrace the process because I was afraid of looking bad and receiving strange looks or negative comments from others. Ironically, those fears only served to make things worse for me, as you will soon learn. The type of deep-seated insecurities I wrote about back in 2014 led to a series of missteps that have made the going gray process harder and significantly set back my progress.

In today’s post, I give a recap of the steps I have taken during my lengthy gray hair transition process. I also share some not-so-flattering photos of my hair at various points in the journey. Warning – this is a very long post that I considered breaking into two parts, but I think it works better as a single long essay. If you’re not interested in the topic of gray hair transition, feel free to skip this one, as I will be back next week with a different topic.

Battling Negative Body Image: Tips from Friends, Part Two

Debbie Roes

4 comments

April 13, 2018

Last month, I wrote about my ongoing challenge with negative body image and shared some helpful tips on this subject from my online friends. Since I received so much helpful advice for improving a poor body concept and didn’t want the post to get too long, I decided to break it into two installments.

Do you sometimes hate what you see when you look in the mirror?

Today’s post is part two and I hope you will find it beneficial. I also highly recommend that you read the comments section of the original post, as a number of readers offered their own words of wisdom on this important topic. I love how much I learn from all of the wonderful women I know through this blog and my other online communities. As I continue to work on healing my body image, I plan to refer back to these two posts from time to time, and I’m glad to have compiled this advice for others to use in their personal growth journey.

Working Toward an Essential Wardrobe – An April Challenge

Debbie Roes

18 comments

April 6, 2018

After two consecutive posts about communication and relationships, I’m going to switch gears today, but I’ll definitely come back to that topic again soon. In one of my first essays on this blog, I shared my theme for the year, “essential,” and how I plan to ask myself a lot of hard questions this year about what truly adds value to my life and thus deserves a place in my home, experience, and psyche. I subsequently explored the role of information in my life and detailed the steps I’ve taken as a sort of “digital detox” with the technology I use. I’ve also shifted the way I plan my days in order to maximize efficacy over efficiency.

As we move into the second quarter of 2018, I already feel that my theme of “essential” has made a profound difference toward increasing my sense of calm and improving my quality of life. My stress level has decreased as I consume less information, eliminate “digital clutter” on my devices, and include fewer items to my to-do list. Now it’s time to turn back to a subject that I wrote about for four years on my previous blog, Recovering Shopaholic – my wardrobe.

essential wardrobe

Can We Transform Our Broken Relationships?

Debbie Roes

16 comments

March 30, 2018

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topics I explored in my last essay, as well as the wonderful comments made by readers in response to what I wrote. For that reason, I would like to continue the subject of emotional isolation in today’s post. I’m glad I decided to open this can of worms because it’s a major factor in my journey toward a more fulfilling, peaceful, and happy life. Some of my relationships feel so broken, with dysfunctional patterns of interacting that are so ingrained, that I’m not sure how to fix them or even if they can be transformed in a meaningful way. But since writing about other seemingly intractable life issues has given me possibility and a way through in the past, I hope that deepening this exploration will make a difference for me and others with similar struggles.

After I expand upon what I view as a key problem in my – and perhaps your – interpersonal relationships, I delve into the five levels of intimacy identified by psychologists and how they manifest in our communication. I then share sage advice from readers on how we can start to break out of our negative ruts. While I certainly don’t have all the answers, I take comfort and hope from those who have walked a similar path and come out on the other side. Included is a helpful exercise we can all use to shift our focus and change our experience with the people in our lives.

Is there a gulf like this in some of your relationships?

The Things That Isolate Us

Debbie Roes

19 comments

March 24, 2018

We all want to feel connected to others. It doesn’t matter whether we are extroverts or introverts; connection is one of the six human needs that we all share. I have written previously on the topic of loneliness, but my primary focus then was on spending too much time alone and feeling physically isolated from others. Today’s post is about a different type of isolation: emotional isolation, which is feeling alone even in the presence of others. I’m sure most of us have felt this way from time to time, and I believe this type of isolation is a big problem in today’s society.

How Often Do We Truly Communicate?

So many of us yearn for emotional closeness, yet it eludes us, even in this age of extreme connectivity, smart phones, and social media. I feel that emotional isolation largely stems from poor communication. We’re in touch with people all the time, but how often do we truly communicate? How often do we open up and let others know who we really are inside?

emotional isolation

When we’re not keeping in touch by way of social media likes and short comment bursts, many of us engage in superficial relationships in which we only talk about macro topics like the weather, what we’re watching on television, and what’s in the news. I’m not implying that these subjects are insignificant, but discussing them rarely deepens our connections. We’re often “pleasant” with each other but don’t really know the person on the other end of our conversations. We stay safe in what we talk about, and we keep people at arm’s length because we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We’re afraid of being hurt should we opt to share our innermost thoughts, feelings, hopes, and fears, and this keeps us separate from others.

Body Image Rehab: My Past Blog, Continued Challenges, and Advice from Friends

Debbie Roes

21 comments

March 16, 2018

Two weeks ago, I accidentally re-published an old post I was editing as part of back-end enhancements I’ve been doing on Full Life Reflections. Some of you may have received this post – titled “How is Your Body Image?” – and wondered about it, especially if you noticed that it dated way back to August 18, 2010. A couple of comments were submitted following the erroneous re-post, which got me thinking that I should write a new post on the topic of body image. Today I’m going to tell you about one of my early blogs (this is actually my fifth blog!), comment on where I am with my body image now, and share insightful tips from friends for me and others who struggle with feeling bad about our bodies.

The Body Image Rehab Blog

Back in 2010, I wrote a blog titled Body Image Rehab, which focused on my journey to heal a very negative body image. As those who have been reading my writing for a long time might know, I suffered from eating disorders for a large portion of my life. I was dangerously underweight for many years as a result of anorexia nervosa, and I was also bulimic for a long time. Even though the bulk of my disordered behavior around food subsided during my thirties (I’m now 51), I continued to struggle with a very poor body image. I remained highly self-conscious about the way I looked and always believed that I was heavier than I actually was. This impinged upon my happiness in many ways, so I decided to start a blog about body image with the hope of healing myself and others through my insights.

Do you struggle with negative body image?

To Be More Productive, Aim for Efficacy over Efficiency

Debbie Roes

11 comments

March 9, 2018

I don’t know about you, but I always seem to have a to-do list that never ends, which leads me to feel like a “hamster on a wheel” much of the time. Even when I have what could be called a very productive day, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the many, many things I need to do. What makes the situation all the more challenging is that I have quite a few other days when I feel like I’m slogging through quicksand to get much of anything accomplished at all.

When I look around at those people who I consider “successful,” I think that they must be super productive every single day. They must accomplish considerably more to-do list items than I do, and that’s why they’re so successful. This makes sense on the surface, but I recently read an article that gave me a whole new perspective on the concept of time management. In today’s post, I share the key concepts from that article, how I’ve been putting them into practice this week, and the way it has positively impacted my life.

Focus on being productive instead of being busy

The Myth of “Successful” People

Tim Ferriss is the author of multiple best-selling books, including The Four-Hour Work Week and Tools of Titans. Despite the fact that he wrote about working only four hours a week, I always thought he got a lot more done than me with far fewer days of floundering or spinning his wheels. It’s no big surprise that I thought such things, as “successful” people like him are typically portrayed as superheroes by the media. We think they don’t experience the same types of challenges that we mere mortals do, but we’re wrong.

The Capsules

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Why Forgive?

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What is Forgiveness?

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How Often Do We Truly Communicate?

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The Body Image Rehab Blog

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The Myth of “Successful” People

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