A thing that happens when you try to take care of an un-take-care-able person is: you lose yourself. I say “you” – second-person – because there is only one first person in this equation. The only subject is the person in need. The needs are bottomless. Will never be fulfilled.
The object, acted-upon and perpetually in action, the do-er, is secondary.
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You, in this instance, is someone who shops as a defensive undertaking. Almost desperate, this activity. Shopping is a restatement of
opinion,
aesthetic,
point of view,
taste
that arises from the choices second-person can make in the space inside a TJ Maxx. Here, no one is asking second-person for anything, no one is berating her, no one needs to be cajoled. Second-person sorts, second-person chooses, and in this way second-person constructs a self. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a thin layer of self, the distance from floral blouse to skin. It’s still a self. Unique, distinct.
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It’s not a coincidence, maybe, that the only thing about me which gets my mother’s attention, in these years, is a thing I’m wearing.
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I come to reckon with the closet, whose doors stand perpetually open so I am constantly confronted by its contents. The closet is what it holds, just as I am. There is a row of matching hangers; a sea of muted blues, greens, berries, dusty pinks; and the shelf above so packed with folded clothes I can’t tell what’s up there. Those stacks always start out tidy, they just break down over time. This is the risk of having simply too much to manage. The life that got totally unmanageable, over years, and all at once.
The closet is in progress of being dismantled. Next to it, a growing pile of donations.
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Being plus-sized in the nineties and early aughts was a different experience to now. At risk of sounding like an Old: Online shopping did not exist in those days. There were two stores in the mall that sold “extended” sizes, and one of them was for teenagers and deeply unwearable for an adult with a corporate job. So a person developed certain tactics when clothes-shopping:
- if the thing fits, buy it
- especially if the pants are the right length, buy them immediately, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars
- if there is more than one of it, buy two
- if the thing is not perfect, still buy it. You will not see it again and what do you see next will be much worse.
Nowadays, one can look at this state of mind and call it “a conviction of scarcity.” But the thing is: the scarcity was real. I was right to have that conviction.
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(One time a well-meaning straight sized friend opined that I needed a pair of green pants. I had to keep from hysterically laughing. One did not simply buy a pair of green pants. One gathered one’s mental and emotional strength to look for pants – the hardest garment to fit – and if one was so lucky to find a pair, one pounced on them, regardless of what color they were. If one was really lucky, they were black.)
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I imagine a lot of people who struggle with over-shopping have lived some version of this conviction of scarcity. And now that we can finally push back on that lack, we are going to: all bets off; enter retail therapy, baby!
But the behaviors that served me then do not serve me now. In the intervening years, more stores have started carrying women’s plus sizes (at least up to a point; they still tend not to serve beyond a 3x, which omits a massive number of people). After years of cultivating the shopping habits of a determined and starving hunter-gatherer – shop constantly, try everything, make a thing work even if it’s not your first choice, go way outside your comfort zone just to stay dressed – we have – I’m not going to call it an abundance of plus-size clothing, but at least a bit more of a selection.
I was in a Boscovs a couple of years ago, and the amount of clothes in the women’s (aka, not misses) section was so great the clothes were actually falling off the racks. I was in shock. I also made a lot of bad decisions that day because while there was volume, the quality was dismal. This was before I got serious about fabric content.
But my point is: it did get better; it is better. There are more choices now. And so, my two decades of being a professional-grade shopper is now hazardous to my mental health, and to a degree my bank account.
[However: Vogue reports that many brands are now scaling back their plus-size lines, so I suppose I’d better not get too sanguine.]
But here I am now: I have a closet full of things I actually love, but they are fighting for their lives against a bunch of other things:
- things I do not love
- things I used to love and can no longer truly see for what they are
- things another version of me loved
- things a me that will never exist would have loved
- things I needed, but don’t love: ie, corporate clothes, work clothes, event clothes (weddings, funerals)
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We ask a lot of clothing. It is supposed to a) cover us, b) signal our acceptability to others, c) signal our uniqueness and specialness to others, d) make our unacceptable bodies acceptable. Especially if you are fat, your message about clothing always involved the word “flattering”; flattering just means “as thin as possible.” So a lot of fat women my age ended up with a mostly black wardrobe, because it’s true that black swallows light and recedes, especially in photographs, whereas white expands and reflects light. (Light colors take up space. Interesting.) It took me a lot of years to consider whether I even like black as a color, as opposed to just finding black useful. (I maybe don’t like it? But I’m not there yet.)
And this idea that clothing is self-expression is lovely, but I promise you, self-expression is secondary. If you are finding self-expression through clothing, you have already negotiated with a, b, and d above. You may have negotiated it without even thinking about it, but it was a labor nonetheless. But because humans are essentially creative little wild-cards, we want clothing to be self-expression. We keep trying.
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Well but. I wanted to talk about the clothes. The things themselves. (Impossible to talk about the clothes without the ungovernable body intervening, but okay.)
My overfilled closet is evidence of my coping mechanism – all that compulsive searching, all that desperation. The habits that, as I said, served me well until they didn’t. I have enough clothes I like now that I don’t need to “just buy it, you might be able to make it work.” It’s been the work of these past few years to re-frame my behavior to match reality: I don’t need to buy things I don’t actually love. I don’t need to buy things that are poor quality. And I maybe don’t even need to buy a thing I love, because I just have too much at home that I already love, and too much is a cause of actual suffering.
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My mother never liked my clothes, in a general way. She did not like my hair long. She used to confidently state that short hair is “more becoming,” and signalled that my clothes did not align to her preferences. She is very preppy in a born-that-way way. I am the inverse of preppy. When I was small, my career aspiration was “sorceress.” Izod polo shirts became popular in the eighties, and I just instinctively hated them. Teenage me loved thrift stores and the men’s section of department stores; my favorite item was a summerweight wool tuxedo – secondhand – that I wore the pieces of constantly for years. Once I wasn’t straight-sized anymore, all that creativity and freedom just disappeared and I struggled to find anything I really felt at home in.
At one point in my thirties or early forties I wore a slightly more corporate-esque printed black-and-white blouse, and my mother exclaimed “that’s what I want you to wear to my funeral!” I was like… well, it’s going to have worn out before then; am I supposed to keep it pristine and hope it still fits many years from now? I cannot even remember the shirt, because as I say, it was not quite my style; I donated it years ago. Don’t ask me what I’ll wear to her funeral. Will I try to slake her taste in my clothes one last time?
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What are the things in that get-rid-of pile? The things that pilled, the things that pulled, the things that were the wrong color and I only bought them because they fit. The things with too many embellishments added to an otherwise okay garment (this is a particular risk of plus size clothing, as if the designer was like “how do we distract from the body? I know, SPARKLES!!”).
What are the things that get to stay in the closet? The colors that appeal to my eye, the cuts that appeal to my sense of volume. And I find out: when I buy only what I love, somehow it all goes together pretty seamlessly.
The mistake most of us make in curating a wardrobe is to pick up and look at each item of clothing separately. When we do that, we see: possibilities, of this thing, right here. The way to look at a wardrobe is as one evolving creation, and how it’s serving you. Not just how is it clothing you, but how does it all make you feel. If you feel overwhelmed, or excluded, then that’s a real stressor you are enduring every day. And so I am realizing that if I have 30 shirts – even if they are all good shirts – that overwhelms me and I’ve finally grown tired of being overwhelmed. Maybe I’m just weaker now and can’t tolerate overwhelm the way I used to.
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After a couple decades of not liking my clothes, she softened a bit. As I said, she does comment on the the things I’m wearing now; recently she said she liked a lilac-colored shirt with a ruffled sleeve. It’s almost as if I won her over with decades of just being my actual self.
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There is still some self-preservation in me. If I ever considered dressing to please my mother, it was more of a passing concession. I still hate preppy clothes, except for highly specific Talbots sweaters with giant hearts on them. In this way is the sartorial function of “preppy” undermined by the existential function of “ridiculous.” And in fact a lot of my favorite clothes are very funny to me.
Many days, I am so stressed and overwhelmed that I don’t perceive my existence as a contiguous thing; the few minutes when I get dressed is the only time when I feel like myself. When I am working, trying to answer the competing needs of many people; when I am trying to keep all the parts of another person’s life from falling apart; when I am driving from one doctor’s appointment to another – my outfit is the one thing that asserts I exist. The clothes I choose, the pieces of carefully collected jewelry – are the last part of me to go down in the sea of other people’s needs. Other than that, I vanish. I was trained to be this way, and it is maybe in my nature to be this way. This disappearance is my bête noire; it is also my secret superpower in my career, this ability to sense-what-you-need, to bend into any shape.
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Who do we serve when we abdicate ourselves? The other person may after all be delighted in your abdication. And abdication of a style sense is something you do for a viewer: as you wear the clothes they would have you wear, you reflect them back on themselves, you reinforce their sartorial opinions, you reassure them everyone wants to dress this way: to look smaller, to look more professional, to mimic in the elision of your body some norm they have done no work to unravel. But this abdication does not end well. The things in my closet that are not “me” are the things in danger of going to the donation pile (and let’s be real, very likely to a landfill, although I can hope they spend time on a person’s body first – someone who likes them!). My point is not to assert to you “long hair is good” or “polo shirts are bad” or even “your clothes should amuse you” – my point is that we ought to arrange ourselves less for the hyper-critical eye of the other and more for us and what we want to feel, the stories we want to tell ourselves.
The self cannot in fact be abdicated. She can only be put aside, or hidden under a thin dense layer of the wrong thing.
