Seven Dresses - Day Four

Today's dress comes with somewhat of a sad pedigree. While most of my dresses are associated with a special occasion or happy memory, this one has no such good fortune. It has only been worn once, which isn't unreasonable, considering I just purchased it last month, but that one day just so happened to be the day that Zac and I broke up. Things had been tense between us for a couple days, and I could feel a confrontation brewing. I was feeling stressed and in low spirits, so I decided to throw on my new dress to remind myself that I am sexy and desirable. As I feared, things escalated out of control that day, leading to the breakup, but at least I looked fierce when I headed out with Lauren to lick my wounds later that evening.

This dress has several things going for it that I enjoy. It has sleeves (seriously, why is it so hard to find a dress that has sleeves? I don't like showing off my arms, and it's nice to not have to find a cardigan sweater to match every dress in my closet), the defined waistband gives me that much coveted hourglass shape, and, of course, it's partially purple. I really am a sucker for purple clothes, so much so that I even pulled out my purple flats to match (and they really do match, I'm not sure why the lighting makes this dress look so blue-violet -- it's really more of a red-violet in person.) Although the flats have less to do with complementing my outfit and more to do with the fact that after three days of heels, my feet were getting ready to stage a mutiny.

I was glad to wear this dress again. I like this dress, and it was time to reclaim it from its negative associations. Instead of "the breakup dress," now it is "the purple dress that got me compliments from five separate coworkers." It might not be a meeting with an important dignitary or a joyous family gathering, but if people want to tell me I look nice all day, who am I to turn them down?

As a result of all the compliments, I experienced an interesting phenomenon today -- for the first time during this project, I got a little depressed about getting all dressed up with no place to go. After all, I had on a cute dress and I'd spent extra time fixing my hair this morning; for me, this is about as good as it gets, appearance-wise, and yet I was headed home to eat leftovers and watch the season finale of Grey's Anatomy. I suppose it was bound to happen. Even if I wear a dress every day for a week, it's still enough of an anomaly in my behavior that it feels special, and it naturally follows that I should want to do something special too. It might make perfect sense, but that doesn't make it any less disheartening...