You are not the clothes you wear

I feel like my skin doesn’t fit. Someone else’s clothes hang in my closet. I sleep on other people’s choices, under someone else’s preference. I drink from another woman’s coffee cups and cook with some other chef’s pots. Such is our simple life. We are recyclers; we make do. For financial reasons as well as altruistic ones, we accept unwanted Things. Because we have excellent taste in friends and family, our Things tend to be pretty much in line with who we are and if not that, at least they’re of excellent quality.

I confess that the lack of choice is comforting sometimes. I find as I spend hour upon hour on the Internet researching different flooring options ( pricing, pros and cons, does this match with our furniture, is the glue in this one poisonous, does this color make me look fat?) that I am not a person who needs a vast array of options. Options make me nervous and twitchy and pondering my options is a huge time suck.

For this reason I don’t generally think about the clothes in my closet and how I didn’t choose any of them. Obviously I CHOOSE them every day, but for the most part nothing I own screamed at me from a store window and ended up on my credit card. I’m pretty proud of that part, the part where my credit card is clean of my desires, but sometimes I wonder what I would look like if I bought my own clothes, based on my own taste? Would my living room be green if we hadn’t come into possession of 10 gallons of sage green paint?

I don’t even remember what my taste is. You know what my style is now? Easy. Do the shoes slip on? Are the socks warm? Does the bra dig into my back? Will puke come out of this shirt? How far does my belly hang over the waistband of these pants? Does this need to be ironed, ever? (if so, into the donation pile it goes)

It’s not just clothes. Books, too, until recently. I read books that people gave me, or that could be had for 5 bucks in the checkout line. And then I rediscovered the library, and I am spreading my wings again little bit by little bit. I have discovered that even though I’d like to love Sue Miller, I don’t, really. And that I have no desire to work my way through the classics.

I commented on a friend’s journal this morning that I felt a few years ago as if I were about to unfold, and then a marriage and 2 babies happened. Now I’m ready, but ready to unfold into what? Who am I? Is this it? Is this all I am?