Realizing

Brains are funny; you have to pay attention.

I’ve developed a set of less-shopping coping mechanisms over the years, and as I’ve gotten older I care less and less what anyone thinks of my clothes.

My wardrobe lives in two really distinct planes. I have a job that is about half a step away from requiring a business suit. (I buy most of my work clothes second hand.) The other is getting quirky these days, by local standards, although it’s pretty typical among my sustainable fashion folks: political themed T-shirts, State the Label Smocks, hand knit sweaters, tunic dresses, flat shoes, layers of things.

And then I got invited along on a business trip of my husband’s, and I was in a wardrobe panic. An actual panic. I almost bought things, just so that I would have “something to wear.”

My work clothes are Too Much, you see, and my weekend clothes are an entirely different Too Much.

Fortunately I snapped out of it before I went on some weird buying spree. (I did pick up a very justifiable new pair of shoes.)

I do not have to perform as the site of conspicuous consumption to impress my husband’s work peers.

It’s absolutely astonishing how fully we’ve inhabited those things, and how deeply they attach to our subconscious identities, no matter how fully we think we have evolved past them.