Don't worry, there's no monster in your closet
How many women wake up and start getting ready for work, school, brunch, a date, etc and then panic in front of the closet because they have no idea what to wear? It’s ok, you can raise your hand behind your back. I have never been a fashionista, and while I am not color blind, I am terrible at putting together outfits. I have always been a t-shirt and jeans kind of girl. However, I have slowly updated my style to include boots, cardigans, pretty tops, etc. But my biggest issue is that when I actually succeed at putting together an awesome looking outfit, I stick to it like gum! And then it defeats the purpose of looking good, since I end up repeating that outfit once a week.
Going through college, I would watch these girls show up to class looking like they were ready for the red carpet. Mind you, they were not in gowns, but just looked so good and put together that I could not understand how they were pulling off the look with jeans! So to help myself out a bit, I started taking note of why I thought they looked good. Was it a necklace that pulled the look together, a scarf, a purse, or just the simplicity of the outfit that made them look so on top of it? Most of the time, it was one small detail that was added and turned the look from boring to simple beauty. A lot of times too there was make up involved, which has most certainly never been a strong area of mine.
After college, I started working at Amazon.com. While it has a very laid back policy regarding work attire, I have tried veeeery hard to not show up in jeans and a t-shirt every day. Since there were plenty of days in the beginning where I would just stand in front of my closet and look around it completely lost, I came up with my own trick to putting outfits together: copy what I like from other people. Similar to what I noticed in college in others' outfits that I liked, I started putting together outfits by using a mannequin and figuring out if I liked it from far away. That was usually easier to judge than when I was wearing the outfit myself and just looking in the mirror.
Also, to make my life easier, whenever I saw a picture of someone online and I liked what they were wearing, I saved the image. I eventually created my own little library of outfits on my computer, finding a way to replicate these outfits with whatever I owned without spending thousands of dollars. What helped this process the most was shopping for easily transformable items. I started shopping for either stand out shirts or simple enough items that combined with others would look different each day. This has made it much easier to get ready in the morning. Having a starting point when you are lost on how to do it yourself is always a great help. Going forward, I will try to post an image of an outfit I liked that I found online, and how I turned it into my own version that is appropriate and comfortable for work.