Winona Dimeo-Ediger

Dressing your age is much more complicated and personal than it might seem. Only you can decide if that “awkward” feeling about your revealing outfit came from a place within yourself or from outer pressure to look or dress a certain way.

When you’re helping people zip up dresses and watching their reactions to certain items of clothing, you start noticing patterns. Here are four of the phrases I hear most often in the dressing room, and how I wish — oh, how I wish! — I could respond.

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Maybe you want to downplay an area you’re feeling insecure about, maybe you’re not in the mood to wear eye-catching colors, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy clothes that effectively make you disappear completely.

Make a u-turn into the darkest recesses of your psyche. Wonder about your life purpose: Were you put on earth to stare at computer screens and pay bills and die? Cringe while imagining what your idealistic college self would think of you now. Conclude that your life lacks creativity and meaning and simple joys.

It can be difficult to describe the pervasiveness of sexual harassment to people who don’t experience it firsthand.

You’re washing dishes or sorting laundry or grocery shopping, half-listening to a random Pandora station when it happens: Your favorite song from 7th grade starts playing.

There are so many ways to be creative. There are no rules about who can create and how and when and why. In every incarnation, professional or amateur, shared or secret, creativity makes the world better.

In this era of constant self-examination, introspection, and Buzzfeed quizzes, this fact certainly brings up an important question. Which version of the song are you: original or (Extra Festive)?! Wonder no more, my friend. Take this handy quiz to find out!

I regularly call upon personal saints for help. Really specific ones whose sainthood only exists in my own mind, but they’re very effective. Today I’d like to introduce you to a few of them; feel free to call on them as often as needed.