I used to be the one who had it sorted.

Corporate creative producer. High pressure, brilliant with people, made things work. My identity was my competence and my style. I knew exactly who I was, and the wardrobe proved it.

Then the role challenged who I was. I broke. I left.

And I tried to shop my way back to myself. New clothes as proof I was still me. As proof I hadn't lost it. But I had lost it. I just didn't know how to admit that yet.

Heart attack at 48. More broken. Kept shopping anyway, because buying something new created a tiny hit of possibility without ever making me face what was already there. I was covering the

loneliness of not knowing who I was anymore, one purchase at a time.

Then money got tight. I started selling the clothes. And in the shedding, something shifted. I started to see who I actually am now. Not who I was. Not who I thought I should be. Who I am.

It wasn't pretty. It wasn't fast. I had to learn to be kind to myself. To let go of perfection, because perfection nearly broke me. To accept that growing older, menopause, fear, "Am I good enough?", all of it was part of becoming, not evidence I'd failed.

The clothes I wear now are still me. But a new version of me. And I don't have it perfected. I've had to drop perfection entirely.

Sometimes I'm still lonely. Sometimes I still think, “Is this it?”. But I can get dressed now. I can open the wardrobe and see myself in it. And that took longer than I'll ever admit, and it cost more than clothes.

Now when I walk into a woman's wardrobe, I see exactly what she's doing. Because I did it.

I see the woman she used to be, still on the rail. I see the shopping as grief management. I see the chaos as protection from an identity question she hasn't been able to answer yet.

So I don't organise the wardrobe. I help her resurface.

I go through everything with her, at her pace, holding the grief of who she was and the momentum toward who she's becoming. I help her see that the woman she is now, her style, her taste, the things that make her feel like herself, are already there. Not in the new purchases. In the back of the wardrobe, buried under the performance clothes and the old identity.

What she walks away with isn't perfection. It's the start of seeing herself again.

Which is the only thing that actually lets her get dressed in the morning without the spiral. I live in East Sussex with my husband and our two lurchers. I renovated our Victorian villa myself, because doing hard things with my hands is how I stay sane. I know what it costs to stand in a room and admit you don't know who you are anymore. And I know how to help you find your way back.