Coco Chanel once said, “Every day is a fashion show, and the world is your runway.” Six-year-old me took that quite literally. I had been talking nonstop about my first day of kindergarten — a highly anticipated event and an exhaustive subject for anyone around me.
Some kids grew up with parents who would drop everything to drive them to school. Not me. My parents fully intended to put my twin brother and me on the school bus every morning until we could drive ourselves.
I’ve made declarations about random things at every age of my life, and 6 was no exception. I told my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, people at church — whoever would listen — that I was going to march onto that school bus and walk down the aisle like a little kindergarten model. (Clearly not considering that 1. we were the second stop on the route, so my audience would be my bus driver, Carol, and a handful of Amish kids, and 2. kindergarteners had to sit at the front of the bus, making my “runway” only about a foot long.)
Hilariously, when my big day finally came, my dad had to carry me — crying — onto the bus. No kindergarten model here.
You can never redo a first impression. While that may be true, you can do your best to make sure people mostly forget what their first impression of you even was. Fortunately for me, the only people who remember that are my parents and Carol.
Looking back, that moment still makes me laugh — but it also reminds me how style and presentation have always mattered to me. Not in a superficial way, but in the way they signal confidence, care and self-respect. Whether you’re walking down a school bus aisle or walking into a meeting, what you wear — and how you wear it — tells a story.
That morning ended in tears, but it taught me more than I realized. It wasn’t just the drama of unmet expectations — it was my first lesson in how preparation and reality don’t always match. I had the plan, the vision, the outfit, the confidence (right up until I didn’t). That tension between control and chaos has followed me in more adult forms — pitches or ideas that didn’t land, outcomes that didn’t match effort, outfits that looked better in my head.
But it also taught me resilience. You recover. You try again. You figure out what matters, fix what you can and keep showing up — sometimes overdressed, but always learning.
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