Notes on Styling | A New Chapter

I met up with my 3 best friends and their families recently (over Easter weekend). I usually don’t make too many get-togethers, living in England always made it harder. But no more, as Paul and I moved back to Dublin in January.

My stepdaughter came with me. She was over with us for the weekend and we decided to make a day of it. And so the day goes as it would normally go. Except everything felt different. I have her with me. The person who has become my family. Not by my making but by my choosing. Having her there, speaking for herself, telling her stories, being near me, they could see what time has meant for me and her. It was real. The family I have built. The life.

I hadn’t really thought about what that day would mean. But it turned out it meant a lot.

That’s the thing with choosing any path less worn. It can sometimes feel abstract and over there to other people, even to your people. I guess it’s the same for me with their lives.

We chatted the whole way home about life’s choices - she and I. She told me she really saw me that day. The way you see a person is when you see them around their friends.

I’ve been on many trips, coffees, dinners and visits where I have felt the oddness and sometimes the loneliness of not having chosen a traditional path. Of not having kids and of having a strange older husband creature ;-) It has brought an otherness to my life and a particular set of feelings I know a lot about.

But what I’ve also learnt is that although something may be hard, that doesn’t make it any less right for you.

It’s truly okay. I believe that if we want to be happy and at ease in the life we have chosen—in other words, to be fully who we are meant to be—we are going to have these discomforts in our choices. Allowing ourselves to be the odd one out sometimes helps us to practice being ourselves. But this was the day, I guess, I had been hoping would come along, without even realising it.

I’ve met many of you over the years in one way or another and yet I wonder how many of you have kids or don’t. How many of you live lives on paths that you’ve had to work hard to feel steady on (most, I’m sure). How many of you are going through hard feelings right now?

Making choices is one of the big privileges lots of us are lucky enough to have. To stay or go, to take one job over another, to push ourselves outside our comfort zone or not. To choose peace or adventure. To choose to see peace in adventure!

And so I am here to remind myself (and you) of the power of our choices and to tell you, in my writing absence, since moving home to Ireland, I have been making new choices too.

Turning 43 in March | Stepdaughter & niece making cake | Lunch out in Dublin | Celebrating my Mum's 80th Bday in Wexford | Hubby & I the day we moved (again!) | Finding local coffee spots | My actual baby | The forever job of finishing our home in Dub.

I have been doing a lot of reflecting on my work how proud I am of what I have been doing. As much as I have loved working first as a personal stylist, then as a teacher & trainer and in the last few years a coach, through it all, it’s never really been about the clothes for me.

What’s mattered so much more is making someone feel authentically themselves. Helping them to tap into a part of themselves that perhaps they had lost or forgotten or they felt had disappeared over time. Clothes helped me to help them do that.

I have always loved that my one-on-one work could sew these little seeds, reframe how someone saw themselves, or just create a more positive internal voice that had other knock-on effects. I have developed and honed a way that clothes and step-by-step coaching could do that.

But then the moment came when I started to allow a thought creep in - how could I help in a more meaningful way? In a way that was not about the clothes anymore?

They say things come into your life when you are ready for them.

And so I have news.

I have been accepted into a Master’s in Psychotherapy.

I only fully began to let in the idea earlier this year, and If I’m honest, I wasn’t sure I’d be accepted. I wasn’t sure if my background would be reflected upon as I reflect upon it - as something deeper, something tangible and a very real part of making a person feel understood, heard and accepted.

But it was, and I got my place.

And so my trajectory in what I do will change. In time. I am sure everything will change!

And I’m excited.

I am also very sorry I have been so terrible at writing here over the last few months, as I worked through applications and interviews and moving back to Ireland. I’m going to leave this space fluid for now. I love writing. I love sharing. And my feeling is towards making this space much more personal. As I settle into life in Ireland, there are lots of things I would love to write about - I am going to see where that approach will take me. No rules on what I want to write about - just share the sort of things I enjoy reading and writing about, that I think you guys might enjoy too.

I’d love you to come along for the journey and see how it all unfolds.

Until next time, thank you for being here.

Julie x

p.s What might I change the name of my Substack to??!