Winona Dimeo-Ediger

fashion entrepreneur. advocate for human trafficking victims.

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.

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.

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.

F*ck that noise. Wear a bikini if you want. Or wear a one-piece if you want. Or wear a baggy t-shirt from a Def Leppard concert and knee-length bike shorts if you want. Wear whatever you want. But definitely go to the beach.

Hopefully you say “I love you” to your partner as often as possible. But how often do you tell them you like them? Because as much as we might take loving each other for granted, liking each other isn’t always guaranteed, and it’s rarely vocalized.

"These days, I don’t shop at the mall very often, but every once in a while when I find myself at a mall — any — I’m overcome by a wave of nostalgia for my salad days (although perhaps “Sbarro calzone days” would be a more fitting expression here). In many ways, I grew up in these chain stores and pretzel kiosks. And sometimes I feel compelled to write melodramatic poetry about it."

The thing is, we soak in these body-judging lessons from a very young age, before we even know how damaging they are. Some of the messages are implicit, like when we see a fat girl getting made fun of on the playground (or, for many of us, when we are the fat girl getting made fun of on the playground) and learn that being fat is not just wrong, it’s a punishable offense.

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.

I’d been so busy patting myself on the back for conquering my big fears, I failed to acknowledge that the types of things that scare me had shifted. A lot of the obvious stuff didn’t bother me anymore — but what about all the smaller, more personal things that still scared the living shit out of me?