All About Identity - I Turned 40, Burned Out, and Went to India.
- Gigi
- Mar 6
- 4 min read
Here's What I Learned About Style, Identity, and Coming Home to Yourself.
Let me tell you something I don't usually share publicly.
Not a capsule wardrobe formula. Not a spring trend edit. Something more important than any of that.
Back in September, I turned 40. I want to be clear: I am genuinely grateful for that. Getting older is a privilege, and I know it. But the honest truth is that I arrived at 40 completely burned out. Not "need a long bath" burned out. Burned out burned out, the kind that settles into your bones.
I was in severe pain from a chronic back condition that had been plaguing me for several years. I had no energy. I'd become what doctors call a "grey area patient", not bad enough to qualify for surgery, but not well enough to be told everything was fine. The pain was constant, and the burnout was slowly tipping into something far darker.
And then I stopped getting dressed.
The Sign I Couldn't Ignore
As a stylist, I know what it means when a woman stops getting dressed. It's one of the earliest and clearest signs that something is wrong , that she's stopped showing up for herself, stopped seeing herself as someone worth the effort. It's a territory that borders depression and anxiety, and I knew I was crossing into it.
I was someone's mum. Someone's wife. Someone's daughter. I had spent years showing up for everyone else and somewhere along the way, I had lost the thread back to myself.
Something had to change. And a spring trend guide wasn't going to fix it.
Saying Yes to India
My two daughters are 14 and 17 that glorious, exhausting, in-between age where you are simultaneously a full-time taxi driver, an on-call therapist, and utterly invisible. I could feel the inevitable separation coming, that slow loosening of the tight grip of motherhood. And I realised I had no idea who I was outside of it.
So I did something completely outside my comfort zone: I said yes to India.
Two weeks. A total mental and physical cleanse. Ayurvedic treatments. Stillness. No school runs, no client calls, no one needing anything from me.
And something remarkable happened.
For the first time in years, I wasn't someone's mum or someone's wife. I wasn't a daughter or a business owner or anyone's therapist. I was just Gigi.
Just Gigi.
I had genuinely forgotten what that felt like.
What Came Home With Me
Miraculously and I don't use that word carelessly my back pain is now at a 2 out of 10. Not gone, but transformed. I'm more attuned to my body than I have been in years. More present. More myself.
And it started me thinking: how many women are living exactly where I was?
Burned out. In some form of pain, physical or emotional or both. Still showing up for everyone else. Still performing the role. But quietly disappearing from their own lives and from their own mirrors.
Why I'm Telling You This Instead of Sending You a Trend Guide
I'm a stylist. Right now, in every other newsletter and Instagram account you follow, someone is telling you what to wear for the in-between weather. What's in for spring. What trainers are having a moment.
I can't do that today.
Because I believe, with everything in me, that many of you don't need another trend.
You need permission to slow down.
Before You Put Another Plaster on It
I know the urge. You're feeling flat, or low, or like you've lost your shape somehow so you buy something. A new top. A new bag. Something that promises to make you feel better for approximately forty-eight hours.
I understand it. I've done it myself.
But that's a plaster on a wound that needs something more.
Before you add to basket, I'd gently ask you to sit with these questions:
Who are you now? Not your job title, not your relationship status. Who is the woman living in your body right now, and what does she actually need?
What is your life really like? Not the Instagram version. The real one the school runs and the long evenings and the work you love and the work you resent and the friends who fill you up and the ones who drain you dry.
What colours make you feel alive? Not the ones you wore ten years ago. Not the ones that are "in." The ones that make you look in the mirror and feel something.
What do you want your reflection to say? About who you are, where you are, and where you're going
Style is not trivial. I know it gets dismissed that way as vanity, as surface, as something far less important than the real work of life. But I've spent my career watching what happens when a woman reconnects with the way she presents herself.
It isn't about fashion. It's about identity. It's about the story you tell the world every single day before you even open your mouth.
Our clothes are our business card to the world, and to ourselves. And when we stop caring about that card, we've usually stopped caring about something much deeper.
When was the last time you looked in the mirror really looked and felt a genuine flicker of "yes, that's me"?
You're not alone in this. And you don't have to stay invisible.
With love,
Gigi x
Gigi Vakilzadeh is an award-winning personal stylist and founder of Styling with Gigi, based in North London. She specialises in working with women navigating life transitions, helping them reconnect with who they are now, through colour, style, and identity. She has been featured in The Telegraph, The Guardian, the Daily Mail, and Woman & Home.
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