View from my reading chair in the garden, yesterday afternoon.
And the reason I was sitting in the garden, instead of in the cool and shady house:
She gets antsy to come and out and sunbathe, so we do, for short periods. Then I insist that we go inside again before we have heat stroke.
Today marks two hundred days of what, as I remarked on Sunday, I really should be calling a slow-buy year, not a no-buy. Still, two hundred days is something. I haven't been to Goodwill. I haven't darkened the door of the Good Neighbor Shop. I haven't come home with a bag of dubious stuff that I bought because it was there and cheap, and also secondhand, which was how I always consoled myself --- stuff I had bought not because I wanted it, but because I wanted something, and while the stuff I had bought was not necessarily what I had wanted, it was . . . stuff. It came from the thrift store, so it didn't really count, just like calories at the beach or in Las Vegas or wherever you are when you tell yourself that you're not really eating, and what you're not really eating isn't really food, because where you aren't isn't real. And anyway, I was bored. Having stuff that wasn't the same stuff I already had gave me a little lift. Of course the lift was temporary, but that was what thrift stores were for: to hit up again when the last lift wore off.
So for two hundred days, I have not done that.
Instead, I've largely worn what I have. Even though I have made a couple of considered clothing purchases --- a dress and some shoes --- I'm mostly saving them for an occasion in the fall, after which I intend to wear them a lot more. Not that I don't wear them now, but I'm wearing them sparingly and lightly, so as to keep them fresh and new. Meanwhile, I am doing a lot of window shopping in my mind, tabulating a list of things I want, and letting all of that sit. When I buy something again, it will be another considered purchase, and it will be what I want, not simply what's there.
Some of this is just a shift in spending patterns. Saving money at the thrift store, I was spending a remarkable amount over the course of the year, and with some notable exceptions it wasn't money well invested, in clothing I would wear over many years. I might as well not drop $30 a month on clothes, I figured. Or $50, sometimes. I might as well wait and drop $150 on a single item I've carefully determined I really want and will wear regularly for a long time.
But some of it is also a shift in how I see myself. I've always felt guilty about spending money on myself, in the same way that another person might feel guilty about eating ---- then turn around and binge at midnight when nobody is watching, consuming far more than if they'd just sat down and had the ice cream, or whatever, at dinnertime. Feeling that you shouldn't do something, and especially feeling on some deep level that you don't deserve to do something, doesn't mean you won't do it. It just means you'll do it in some under-the-table way, where you're simultaneously denying to yourself that you're really doing the thing and doing a lot more of it as a consequence, in a way that's never quite satisfying. Eating a tub of ice cream alone at midnight doesn't satisfy you the way sitting down to a good meal with other people does. Thrift shopping in the same spirit, because you believe you don't deserve nice things, is a similarly unsatisfying experience. Weirdly, too, the fact that it isn't satisfying is what drives you to keep doing it. You're never full. You never have a sense of enough. You come away not satisfied, but ashamed. How could I eat a whole cheesecake? How did I spend so much at Goodwill? It's a hole you're trying to fill, even though every attempt to fill it only digs it deeper.
Maybe that's over-psychologizing a little, but it is an epiphany I've had: what happens when you tell yourself you deserve to settle, when you say to yourself, This isn't what I want, but who am I to want things, anyway? This is subtly different from being able to regulate your impulses and your natural desire for instant gratification. Of course we don't get what we want when we want it all the time. Being an adult is all about regulating our desires, learning to discern, learning to be patient and wait for the right thing at the right time. And of course that's an ongoing process throughout our whole lives --- it's not like you're not an adult if you have a disordered relationship with food, or a thrift-shopping problem. It's just that that's one area in which it is possible to have unregulated desires, largely because what you desire is something other than what you're filling yourself with, something you have come to believe you can't or shouldn't ever have. So you work on it, because being adult also means working on it. Maybe you're not perfect --- of course you're not perfect, because nobody is --- but you're also not totally disempowered.
So what's helpful about exercising some formal regulation --- making a no-buy rule, for example --- is that it's a way of both reinforcing a more innate sense of regulation (stop and think before you buy, because RULE) and looking for meaningful ways to support yourself in that process of self-regulation. It's empowering to succeed at whatever challenge you set yourself. Paradoxically, one way to empower yourself is to practice thinking you are good enough to merit some things you actually want, just because you exist. Not that you're becoming meritorious by exercising all this self-control for hundreds of days, to earn a reward, but that you are giving yourself a gift of time in which to discern what your real desires are, and then to respond to them, with the kind of charity for yourself that you hope you'd extend to other people. You'd never (I hope) say to another person, Sorry, but you only deserve cheap stuff. Nice things are for other people, not you. If you wouldn't say it to another person, then practice not saying it to yourself.
Meanwhile, you work on habits that help you determine what nice things you really want, and what you don't want and can let pass you by. You can identify things and look forward to them, which is a whole different experience from just reflexively buying things because they're right there in front of you and you feel like buying. That sense of empowerment underscores your sense of yourself as essentially good and strong and whole. You see yourself exercising self-regulation. You feel good because you are exercising self-regulation. You can choose the things you want. You're not at the mercy of things you don't want, or of not knowing at all what you want. See how that works?
This, to me, is the value of this self-imposed discipline. It feels closely allied with the dress challenge I did last year: that I allowed myself to buy a $130 dress was huge in itself. I did sort of feel that I had to justify that purchase, like it was only okay because I was going to wear that dress for a hundred days. What I remember is how strangely my husband looked at me when I told him what I was proposing to do. He wasn't bothered by my wearing the same dress for a hundred days straight, except that he was afraid I was punishing myself unnecessarily. But what he said was, "I'll give you a hundred dollars. I'll give you a dress." What worried him, rightly, was that he sensed that I felt I didn't deserve an expensive dress unless I jumped through a bunch of hoops to get it.
Now, as it happens, I wanted to do the challenge for some positive reasons, and I am glad I did it. But one of the reasons why I'm glad is that I did stick my neck out to invest in a dress I really wanted. Now I have three of them. Yes, they're kind of expensive, but I'm not buying them on top of blowing money-that-doesn't-feel-like-money-because-it's-the-thrift-store every few weeks. I didn't buy them as an add-on to nine thousand things I bought because I wanted something and thought I might as well make do. Mind you, I'm not spending less money. This isn't about frugality, though maybe it ought to be, with prices what they are right now. Prices being what they are right now, it's actually just as well that I've made a no-buy rule, so that I'm waiting carefully to see what I can spend on clothes, and when. But for me the main takeaway is that I can pull the trigger on something I really want. In the right moment, and for the right thing, I can do it and not feel guilty or unworthy. I can't have everything, but I can discern something, and it can be within my reach. I can spend whatever amount I have to spend on a small handful of things I really want, instead of many things I don't.
So here's to two hundred days of that, and counting.
Meanwhile, wearing today, one of the few real investments I've made in decades of thrift shopping:
It's another non-swing-dress day in my July 4/3 Challenge, but still a dress day. Once again I'm gravitating to the ease of one-piece dressing in hot weather, as I did yesterday with my rose-brown jumpsuit. As I've said many times before, like every time I've worn this dress, here we have my longest-serving item of clothing (with the exception of a teal silk-velour scarf that I've had since 2004). I bought this dress in 2007, I think. Or maybe 2008. We were still living in Memphis, I do know that, so it can't have been later than 2008. The dress was a secondhand item then, bought in a thrift shop, so I don't know how old it actually is. It could date from the 1990s, given the style, but I can't be sure. At any rate, this is a good piece of clothing. It's linen, light and airy. I have always loved the pattern, the colors, and the easy body-skimming shape. For whatever I paid for it, and it was almost certainly less than five dollars, I have gotten at least fourteen years of fairly continuous wear, in many situations. I've worn it to church. I've worn it to parties. I've worn it to walk the dog and work in the garden and cook. I've worn it summer and winter (though I think it performs far better as a summer dress). It just keeps going. It never looks worn or faded or old. It's really the gold standard of thrift-store finds.
So here it is today with my blue EVA Birks, because I am about to walk the dog. Again, it occupies another of the three no-swing-dress slots in my challenge week, which runs Friday to Friday. Tomorrow and Thursday I can relax into my default mode, and then Friday is the start of a new week (the last full week in this challenge, as it happens).
Still waiting to hear more about cover designs for the novel. Back-jacket blurbs should be coming in soon, too --- the deadline is July 22, and I'm a bit on tenterhooks, just because. My mind keeps going, "What if they all said they can't possibly endorse this piece of awfulness??" But I'm trying not to think about it too much.
Daughter is off to work at guitar camp this week, hefting her bass into my car, which I guess I won't be driving . . . So the curtain rises on another day.
LATER:
Linking again to Elyse Holladay's blog post about creating outfits and avoiding the "nothing outfit." I love that concept, the "nothing outfit," because it so accurately sums up so many things I have worn in my life and not known why I didn't feel good in them.
Casting my eye over that post again made me think about how I got dressed today, which was certainly not an effortful affair. I threw on the clothes pictured above to walk the dog. That's it. In five minutes I was dressed and drinking my coffee and ready to be dragged out the door by Dora.
Is this a nothing outfit? Based on the amount of thought and effort I put into getting dressed, and how comfortable I am in what I put on, you might think it was.
BUT
*Most obviously, it's a dress. Dresses tend to say "outfit," more than jeans or sweatpants or gym shorts. They just do. Being one-piece deals, they have an automatic cohesiveness that an outfit of separates might not. You can look really schlubby in a dress --- it can not fit you, it can be the wrong color or shape, you might be wearing shoes that don't look good with it. But I think, anyway, that it's a lot harder to look bad in a dress than in lots of other things.
*In the case of this dress, there's a lot (for me, anyway) to like. The colors are excellent for me. The linen fabric is cool and lovely and nice. It has an instant kind of garden-party vibe. It's a sheath dress, so kind of shapeless, but not a tent. It says "body-skimming," not "this person hates her body and wants to hide." You still get a sense of me and my body's shape and movement.
*Aside from the colors and the floral pattern, I like the scoop neck and bare shoulders, which feel graceful. I always feel kind of graceful in this dress in the summer. It's soft and flowy when I walk. Nice feels.
*The rest of the effect: well, again, it's a one-piece dress, so as long as the one piece doesn't go wrong, there's not much else that can go wrong. The blue Birks are comfortable, and the blue goes with all the other colors in the dress without matching. They provide a dark frame, which makes them look intentional, instead of proclaiming the actual truth, which is that there they were, and I put my feet in them.
*Restrained hair works with this dress. It's kind of an unstructured, flowy dress, so some structure and regulation of the flow of my hair felt indicated, and would have even if I had washed my hair since last Thursday, which I have not. This ponytail took two seconds to create, though I do give thought to what kinds of ponytails look good one me. I don't just scrape my hair to the back of my head. This kind of low, loose ponytail is my favorite: it can look polished without effort, and it doesn't make me look as though I'm trying to be a cheerleader (or forty years younger than I am).
*I put on earrings and a necklace because I always put on earrings and a necklace. I don't get all blinged up, but I also don't feel dressed until I've added those elements.
Is this the absolute BEST outfit I could have made?
Well, depends. For what I'm doing today, it accomplishes what I want. I'm at home, writing, working on projects, tending the garden, walking the dog, cooking, folding laundry. I do not need, and indeed would feel weird, in an outfit that was over-curated. On the other hand, if I were wearing a t-shirt and gym shorts, I'd feel I hadn't gotten dressed at all, and that would make me spiral into depression. I'd feel as though I hadn't had a day, really. So this level of outfit is just right. I feel that I've cared for myself, that I look pretty and graceful without being overdressed. This feels to me like showing up at just the right level.
If I were going somewhere?
*If I were going to Mass, I'd add a cardigan or light jacket, because I like to cover my shoulders in church, and it's always cold anyway.
*Ditto if I were going out to eat. Actually, I don't think I've ever worn a jean jacket with this dress, and that might be a good thing to try, next time I take the plunge into Serious Southern Air Conditioning.
*I could add a straw hat, to up the garden-party feel. I really could have stood to do that this morning when I walked the dog, and I just didn't think about it. But that would be an instant elevation.
Otherwise . . . I really do feel as though I've gotten dressed today. If a dress is a default mode for me (though this isn't a knit swing dress, which is REALLY my default mode), it feels like an automatically better default mode than lots of other things.
The good thing, too, is that I've honed my wardrobe to the point where I just don't have all those old default options, the limp tees, the blah gym shorts, and so on. I literally can't fall back on them. And I'm not sorry, because all the times I did fall back on them were times when I didn't feel good in my clothes. They weren't serving me. There was no reason to hang onto them --- so I haven't.
Instead, I've started to create new default modes that are just as easy, just as comfortable, just as no-brainy, but a lot more effective for me. Mind you, my specific default modes might not work for somebody else. I love this dress, but you don't have to. There's no one foolproof outfit that looks good on everybody. But if you can start thinking about what would be a really effective default mode for you --- that's empowering.