|4 minute read|
Criss-cross on the quilt in the guest room, my mom holds up a t-shirt, then a pair of pants, then a dress. All wrinkled, crumpled from being the reject clothes shoved in a bag in the closet. The Sound of Music is on and I am getting distracted. She holds up a gray long sleeve Tommy Hilfiger shirt, one I found at the thrift store with my friend, one that matched one she had too. Now tossed in the give-away pile. A dress I wore to a highschool dance show, one of my favorites, the rusted orange color complimented my brown hair that I wore in a bun that night. Donated. A pair of jeans with the holes gaping, no longer fashionable, a pair I reached for in the morning nearly every other day. Give-away. The black v-neck shirt I wore to dance class countless times, a staple in my past self’s wardrobe. Another shirt I used to love, a dress I wore once, jean shorts with the tag still on them. All tossed into another rumpled pile to be placed in another bag, to be given to someone else. Growing out, growing in; the growing pains of an ever changing you.
Three garbage bags to Goodwill. These clothes of mine to be hung on a rack, tagged, and colorcoded. And another girl, ruffling through the racks will see what I saw in these clothes. She’ll pick them out, carry them through the store, take them home with her, sit in her closet, rub her skin, collect her sweat. In the same way the fabric did for me.Maybe in one of my shirts she will confess her love for someone, wringing the hem out of nervousness. Or perhaps she will go to her first bar, turning 21 and leaving smelling of beer and the vodka cran she spilled on the front of her. Collecting these memories the clothes will hold forever. But as all cycles repeat, she too will grow old, pick it out of her closet for the last time and think, ‘this isn't me anymore’, and into another garbage bag the clothes go, to be sent again for donation, or a yard sale, or passed along as a hand-me-down. Time and time again. As natural as it is, why does it feel sorrowful?
Shedding our skin, we are new versions of ourselves more often than we might realize. My junior year of college, I bought a pair of joggers I intended to wear to ballet the next day, but in the same night, I decided I didn’t like joggers anymore. Evolving as a person, looking back a few years, even months, and witnessing how different one could be. Change that shouldn’t be feared. In the same breath as sorrow is excitement. Meeting ourselves time and time again, reintroducing, reconfiguring. Wet clay ready to be shaped, held in hands full of creativity. How joyful it is to discover ourselves as new, learn something we didn’t know about ourselves. Using this knowledge to inform our future. Growing into who we are is embracing the newfound autonomy of yourself. Who are you today and what do you want to become? How will you be different tomorrow?
In this establishment of constant change, we will look back at a collection of clothes, toys we used to play with, or notebooks full of geometry notes and realize we will never meet that version of ourself again. Yet the memory of who we were informs who we are, each day forward. Growing out of the things we used to love, used to hold us, into another pair of waiting arms.
Not only clothes have I sifted through, but a copy paper box of old essays I would write to calm myself down when my mother left for school. The made-up tests I would grade when I was playing teacher. Songs scribbled into notebook pages, melodies blended, lyrics as random as a seven-year-old could get. A coupon to baskin-robbins for perfect attendance. The birth certificates of my Webkinz. How funny it is that a piece of paper, meaningless to someone else, can hold such deep nostalgia; for childhood, for simpler times.
But do I sit as a physical collection of myself? Do I need my highschool clothes, or my sixth grade choir book to make someone understand who I was? Why I became the person that I did? And in a pile of junk, there I sit. As three-old-me, as seven-year-old me, as a timid girl in middle school, as a loud highschooler, as an ambitious college-bound student, and as a twenty-something post grad. Growing within these versions that have existed before. The pain of sitting with it all, but the honor to do so. We are who we are because of these things.
And as I continue to purge my past selves in my childhood bedroom, the bedroom that morphed and transformed with me as I grew up, I wonder if I’ll ever completely grow into myself. Will I ever feel just right? Is that even the point? As I’m starting to realize, I don’t think that is as important, as the moments that lay between. I can’t help but feel a touch of longing to separate from my old clothes. The piles of old schoolwork and trinkets from another time. But I grew out of them, and they grew out of me. Growing pains only last so long. And now there is much more space for something new.
we’re all changing together,
natalie <3
