pattern recognition

I'm culling and refining my wardrobe, noticing and breaking cycles, and simply trying to get dressed everyday in clothes that look and feel like glamorous pajamas.

I’ve been living in a loop.

I opened up my five year journal to record my sentence for the day and noticed that the sentence - a reflection on how and where I was, what I was feeling, and struggling with - was identical to the sentence I had written on that day one year prior.

Think about TV portrayals of someone stuck in quicksand. The person flails around, struggles, tries to get out, but the harder they push, the deeper they sink until they are swallowed…or saved.

My life has often felt like that, like struggling in the quicksand, and when I look at my journals and see the hours and years and decades of my life lost to struggling with the same issues, it makes me angry and sad and frustrated. It's difficult to find the motivation to change when I can clearly see that every time I’ve stepped out of the loop, seemingly made progress or addressed an issue or healed a thing, I’ve been pulled back in like a snapped rubber band.

You know that old saying about repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Yeah. I hate that saying.

What else can I do?

I mean, I can’t just sink.

So, I persist. I continue to attempt to leave the loop, which leads me to my closet. (I say “my closet” when referring to my clothing, but my clothes don’t live in just one closet or one dresser. They live on multiple racks and shelves, in drawers and cardboard boxes, thus illustrating the problem.)

Culling my clothing collection is a piece of a larger intention, to cull and clear our entire home, our everything collection, if you will. My closet is a big piece of it though, a hefty task, because it’s tied to lifelong patterns of low self-esteem and body image issues.

I learned early in life that shopping and styling could be a source of comfort and pleasure and as a result, I have over-consumed. These days, I feel the tension between consumption and creativity — shopping and dressing can be an unconscious cycle of rewarding the fatigued brain, but it should also be an intentional, ethical act.

Clothes are not just clothes to me. They are not utilitarian. I admire people who have honed their look to a sort of uniform, able to fit the entirety of their wardrobe into a backpack, but I am not one of those people and that is not my aspiration.

While I love a clean sweep and fresh open space, I am not a minimalist.

I also have a body that morphs and changes by the moment, just like my taste.

But this moment calls me to pare down and get mobile, flexible. It feels important that my household streamline and reduce the energetic load we’re carrying.

I’m only shopping necessities right now and I’m determined to reduce the size of “my closet” before any new things are acquired.

Decluttering this facet of my life is not just about decluttering - it’s about recognizing and breaking a pattern, getting out of a loop. I’m not just looking to minimize, I also want to create a style that feels on purpose and energizing.

I work from home, so I like to wear things that fit and feel like pajamas, but I also don’t want to have to change clothes when I take Rocky out for his walk. When I walk past a mirror, I want to like what I see.

Fashion isn’t frivolous. It’s political. And powerful. The way we dress our bodies and style ourselves is creative expression and that’s important.

I take no interest in what women of a certain age should or shouldn’t wear. That sort of advice is rooted in a desire to control and contain and I have no desire to be controlled or contained.

My choices about what stays and what goes are mine to make.

Yesterday, I picked up a neon pink leopard print sweater and dropped it into the goodbye box. I didn’t wear it once this winter and even though the color and pattern appeal to me, I knew I was probably never going to reach for it. As I sorted it out, I realized that my previous clothing culling efforts may have been thwarted by asking the wrong questions.

Am I going to wear it?

Does it fit?

These are the questions I’ve been asking, but they’re not the right ones.

I own, for instance, a carefully curated collection of 1960s-70s maxi dresses. About half of them are too small for me to wear, but they’re not too small for the mannequin in my bedroom, and I’m not going to get rid of them. I’m not going to get rid of them, because I love them. They are art. They are a part of me.

Whether or not I can wear it right now, isn’t really the point and neither is whether or not I would wear it. I have plenty of things that I would and do wear that should actually go to the box with the neon sweater.

The real question, I realized, that I should ask about each piece of clothing is, would she wear it? Who is she? She is the real me, the true me. She is the woman who pins images to her Pinterest style board. She is the future version of me who has met her goals at the end of the year, who lives like flowing water, who dances on the edge. She takes care of herself and her loved-ones, she has a book deal, she lives in a clean house, sometimes she leaves the house. She is confident when she walks into a room because she is entirely herself. She is the style-icon within.

Helena Bonham Carter as seen on my Pinterest

It’s easy for me to get confused, muddled by the quicksand of emotion and memory as I sift through my things and see old versions of myself, old dreams, old desires, old fears old wounds, but she is ruthless. She just steps right out of the muck.

Getting dressed in the morning is a way of shifting and claiming energy. Changing the way I look creates a new momentum and breaks me out of old patterns. Even one small item can make me feel differently aligned.

Personal style speaks to us and about us.

No one is going to pull me from the quicksand. I’m going to do it myself by approaching this culling project as a project of refinement. My purpose is cut away the excess, the dead energy, the heavy. So I’m going to let her make the decisions about what stays and what goes.

Here’s the question I’m asking:

What would it feel like to get dressed as the person you are becoming rather than the person you’ve been?

Here’s another, perhaps more to the point:

Do you feel like an absolute raging revolutionary goddess in it?

That’s the one.

I’ll keep you posted.