My house was built in 1931. It is a classic Chicago octagonal bungalow designed for people in 1931--their size, their lifestyle, and their stuff. It is not a modern American house and will likely never be one because the kitchen won’t open up to the living/dining room, there’s no possibility of an en-suite bathroom, and the closets are not designed to store a modern American life. Like mine.

I need to edit. Or rather, I need an edit.

I can edit. I’m good at verbs. I have been getting rid of stuff--jobs, burdens, people, anxieties--all year. The idea of “the edit” (noun) is a little more difficult. It’s taken some time for me to get my mind around it because I want to make “edit” into “editing”; a process of clearing out and simplifying. But it’s not about doing the verb, but rather about inhabiting the noun created by the action of paring down. Edit as place.

Before I go winding down a metaphorical path that, I am sure, you see coming, and that I have already traveled (see Enough from August), let’s get back to those closets.

I share a 4 x 3 x 9 closet with an adult male. It has 6 total feet of hanging space (1 long hang and 2 short hangs) and 2 and a half 4-foot shelves for shoes and sweaters. I also have 2 drawers of tees and yoga pants in a standard-sized IKEA dresser. When I look at this collection, I am overwhelmed by the quantity of clothing I have. Now, if these clothes were hanging in a normal American closet, there would be so much empty space, you would think I walked around naked most of the time. But in my abnormal bungalow closets, it’s positively Kardashian. And we cannot have that.

Dress for the job you want

Yes, it's only clothing, but clothes are a symbol--a vehicle really--to broadcast who you are and who you want to be to yourself and to others. A couple of years ago, I thought, briefly, that I might schmooze a little harder to get a promotion at work. Perhaps the place was miserable, but more money would help numb the misery, right? So, I put on some makeup and bought what I thought would be a solid promotion-seeking capsule wardrobe--dark pants, a couple of jackets, a few conservative, middle-aged polyester print shells to go under jackets. I didn’t want to think about dressing for the part; I just wanted to look the part. The experiment lasted about a week. I tried to hold my nose and swallow it, but I just couldn’t choke it down.

Within a few days, I was back to the “yoga chic” look of black pants (stretchy but not exactly yoga pants), tunics, dusters, and dresses. That business capsule wardrobe just hung there. Waiting.

Yoga Chic meets Classroom Credible

When I got my first classes at the City Colleges back in August, I remember texting a friend that my excitement about the job stemmed from the fact that I could wear regular clothes to work. Normal human clothes. But then I realized, I haven’t worked in a normal human place for almost 20 years. I don’t have any normal human clothes. I have clothes that I would not wear anywhere but to work. I have clothes I sleep in/wear around the house. I have clothes I wear to Costco and Target but probably shouldn’t. Where are clothes that I can put on to stand in front of 50 teens & twenty-somethings for 3-6 hours a day and look believable (and perhaps a little cool) and feel that way, too?

Retail Therapy

Macy’s and me, we got this thing. Every few months, I get a few hundred bucks worth of clothes and accessories. I hold onto it for a bit, keep some, and take most of it back. A couple weeks ago, I returned a dress and a jacket that I’d bought earlier in the year as part of that interview/corporate gig plan. They still had tags. I made $150.

I discovered these clothes in the process of flipping closets for the season. As I mentioned, the closets in my house are not designed to do much more than hold your other outfit--the one you are not wearing of the two you own in 1931. Each spring and fall, I move clothing downstairs to the cedar closet and move the next season’s clothes up. This year I noticed that closets--up and down--are filling. I am holding on to too many iterations of who I am and who I want to be to others.

Next week: Part 2: Triangulation