My body is changing.

I don’t know if you see it. You probably don’t see it. Body changes, usually, are felt times one hundred million by the person wearing the skin only, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make a person feel so many things about themselves.

Yesterday, I took a garbage bag and attacked my closet.

“Nothing fits anymore!” I proclaimed like an enemy conquering new territory that’s smaller than they thought.

Adam was there but he didn’t know what to say and that’s because I’ve said this before and he’s said all the right things back but one who is on a self-blahhhh mission doesn’t have the time to listen. So he sat there and I went barreling through.

I picked up short skirts. Tops with edges that crept just a tiny bit below the peak of my rib cage. Jeans with so many holes in them it was hard to figure out where to put my feet.

“And also! All my clothes are for someone who is 22!”

“Yes! I can agree with that!” Adam responded as if this was something he had said before, when I wasn’t ready to hear it, so I didn’t.

You turn 30 and you’re supposed to feel different. That’s not really what happens. You turn 30 and everyone tells you that you should feel different. But the truth is that you don’t. You feel alive, like any other day, almost like any other year.

The truth is, if you’re like me, by age 30, you’ve already felt all kinds of different from the people around you, those with kids, houses, husbands, hopeful career paths that go high up in one direction.

It’s not like the second you turn 30, you update your wardrobe or spend quality time examining the changes of your body that come with age, that come with stress, that comes with time.

You stuff the new into the old. 

Remember when you were 9 and you desperately wanted to stop wearing shorts from the Limited Too but the shorts at Wet Seal were too big, too teenage for you? But you convinced your mom to buy them anyway and when you put them on they floated on your body like a blow-up pool raft?

This is the reverse. This is that feeling twisted in reverse.

So what do you do?

Donate all the clothes in your closet? Stop eating pizza? Work out twice a day?

No. No. No. Please no. 

I picked through the things that no longer fit. I pulled them off hangers, out of folded piles. I looked at myself in the mirror, naked, I examined poking hips and belly fat. I saw myself at 22. Now again, at 31.

Here’s the thing that our body teaches us – we can’t hang onto the past.

So here I am, on the path of learning about this body. Understanding how to make it healthy. Figuring out a new style that fits me now, not then. 

And most importantly, accepting the outer layer that holds together the person who I am. Even if it’s different. Well, Jen, It’s yours. 

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I mumbled to myself before opening the fridge and eating a handful of mini ice cream cones from Trader Joes.