The comments on here are hilarious! What a pleasure to read you all. Alaskagirl, you pose a very legitimate question. There is so much emotion tied to some items... and then we feel betrayed when they don't keep their promises. It's like they let us down. They operated under false pretenses. Underneath it, hides our true sensitivity towards ourselves, our place, our bodies, our lives. Also hides our insecurities.
I am the queen of mistakes.
Sometimes, finding out something was an error of judgement becomes crystal clear very quickly, in fact, sometimes so quickly the tag is still on it. But too often a "mistake" becomes evident only a year later in the form of a closet orphan. A love-at-first-sight item has a minor downside to it. It turns out the downside in question was major, in the end. Major enough that it prevented me from wearing the item.
Or sometimes it's not a downside, but simply a fit or proportion issue. The pretty thing simply does not flatter my body type, period. Meanwhile, I happily innocently go on with life, convinced the item is crucial to my wardrobe. Until one day... boom. I get mad at myself for not recognizing it sooner, despite so much practice.
And then there is the case of the mistake born out of a mistake. It's like they can reproduce, you know. And infest our closets! Let me explain. You acquire a piece, say a top, which fits a closet hole: it's white, it's short sleeves, it's more chic than a cotton tee. Gee, it even has this trendy uneven hem which looks so in. (Very often this scenario happens when you acquire the said top at a sale). Then you find you are not reaching for it as much as you hoped for. "Ah well", you say,"must be because I have another closet hole in the bottom department. I just don't have the right pants to wear this with". And so a new quest is born. Little do you know that you have just stepped into an endless, fruitless labyrinth that can only possibly lead to... another mistake. Which you end up this time paying full price for. Then, you still do not wear the pieces, except the bottom maybe a couple of times separately, and purely to calm your conscience. Then a year later, you finally wake up from your dream and enter full lucidity mode. The tee was not right from the start, period. It was that hem, in fact, that was difficult to work around. It kind of floated over your waist, cutting you just at the wrong place, making you feel like a potato. If you had seen it from the beginning, you would have avoided buying the pants on top of it, and you would have put your energies into looking for the right white short sleeves top. That was an example of a mistake generating orphans. Now what about the pants you paid full price for but almost never wear? Should you get mad at them too? It's not their fault, they never asked for anything... yet, here they are taking valuable space in your closet, with the memory of their high price attached to them. Sigh.
