The upside of my former employer was that the work uniform was jeans (not ripped) and t-shirts (not ripped).

The downside of my former employer was that the work uniform was jeans (not ripped) and shirts (not ripped).

By the way, this same uniform was in force during my self-employed freelance writer days (which was immediately before my former employer) and to the two jobs I held before that.

Which means I have no work casual clothes. None. De nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

I am currently in the middle of "closet shopping", which means going through everything I own.

The problem? With a few very *small* exceptions, I have bought nothing new dress-wise, skirt-wise, or dress pants-wise in the past 10 years. In some cases, as in the cases of the full suits, the clothes are more than 15 years-old.

Before my knee injury that stopped me from running for several years, I was also thinner, so it isn't like I can even dress up the skirts into something useful because I'm one to two sizes too big in most cases. (Don't ask about how much smaller the sizes were when I was running. It's even more heartbreaking.)

Which means the charity thrift store is about to get a fuckton of clothes.

On the upside, I've discovered just how LARGE my bedroom closet is. It's stunningly large, actually. I had no idea because I'd been, well, hoarding all these clothes for all these years. Some of these clothes have been dragged along through no less than 10 moves. (I moved around lot in the years after college.)

You'd think I'd be depressed as shit going through all these clothes and packing them up in bags to bring to the thrift store, but I'm not.

See, I was talking to a friend on the phone last night and she was giving me a million good reasons why I could stop hoarding the damn clothes. She spent a good hour telling me this, along with how I could cheaply and reasonably acquire work-casual clothes without making myself broke.

As weird as it sounds, it was like I needed that kind of permission to finally do what I've been meaning to do since I moved to my apartment 6 years ago: Get rid of clothes that I haven't been wearing, and am not going to wear in the near future because they don't fit or are too far out-of-date to make even a reasonably professional impression.

Even as I'm putting these clothes in the bags and the number of bags are mounting, I'm feeling this weight lift off my shoulders. A weight I didn't even know I had.

It's...liberating.

Plus, I now know that I have a kickass closet that I didn't even know I had.

It's kind of like winning the lottery.

Again.

Pee.Ess. — I've now had 3 recruiters contacting me today with actual, real positions at some fairly large companies. What the ever-loving bloody hell?