As the days grow longer and the trees begin to bloom, it’s clear that we’re entering another sartorial season, but the warmer weather is not good news for all: Yet another winter has come and gone before Sarah found the confidence to wear her beret.
Just heartbreaking.
Despite the fact that this was the seventh consecutive winter she spent telling herself she’d break out her beret for its inaugural wear, the temperatures are back in the 60s and Sarah has completely run out of time to don the floppy hat. Unfortunately, Sarah spent the entire winter trying and failing to muster up the confidence necessary to debut the beret, and now, if she were to wear it and receive weird stares, she would have no way to know if people thought she looked stupid in a beret because it’s springtime, or if they thought she looked stupid in a beret because she just does.
So sad. It’s not like she can even return it—she removed the tag in 2019 as a way to convince herself to wear it, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough of a push given the low self-esteem she’d been experiencing due to her eczema flare.
Sarah’s issue is not just that the hat is a beret—it’s that it’s a red beret. Red is a beautiful color, but an intimidating one. She suspects she’d have an easier time wearing it if it were a more neutral color—brown perhaps, since that’s the color of her hair, and maybe some people wouldn’t really notice the beret at all—but she’s promised herself that she can’t buy a beret in a new color unless she’s worn the one she already has. And for whatever reason, that’s a promise worth keeping, unlike the promise to actually wear the beret, which she makes and breaks each winter.
Sarah has plopped the beret on her head countless times while still inside her apartment, staring at herself in the mirror, telling herself variations of, “You look perfectly chic, you look perfectly cute.” But unless there’s suddenly a day where the temperature drops, and she’s invited to an art opening for the very first time, and her hormonal acne magically clears up resulting in a massive surge of self-confidence, the window of time where she could wear the beret during winter 2025 has officially closed.
What a bummer. Though Sarah has high hopes she’ll wear the beret before the end of the Trump administration, it may be wise to hedge those bets. Ah well. Now that the warm weather is here, it’s time for Sarah’s yearly will-they-won’t-they with a romper she bought during the Obama administration.
