Clothes Collection

Every single morning I stand before my closet and try to figure out what in the world I can wear. I’m always tempted to lament, “I have nothing to wear!” but that’s not true at all. I have two closets full of clothes, a dresser that can barely shut, a pile of t-shirts and shorts that have nowhere to go, and enough shoes to fit a classroom full of size seven’s. Still, I can never find anything to wear. I finally realized that though I do have plenty of clothes, I don’t exactly have a wardrobe. What’s hanging in my closet is more of a clothes collection.

What I mean by “collection” is that my clothes are really more to be looked at and appreciated than to be worn. Think of my closet as a museum. I can look at my clothes chronologically (because they do date all the way back to high school), or I can look at my clothes in groupings: there are two dozen skirts in prints that I loved; there are several white blouses I bought because I always think I need one, not realizing that I have eight more white blouses at home.

Then there is the collection of “someday” clothes. These are clothes that I hope to fit into one day. If I just lose ten pounds, or if I hem them, or if I don’t mind being uncomfortable and unable to move for a certain amount of hours. I don’t know where the logic comes in when I buy these clothes. I know they won’t fit and yet, I just have to have them. I add them to my collection, and like treasured items in a collection, I refuse to get rid of them. I should do myself a favor and bag them up for Goodwill, because these clothes are torture. These are the clothes that I want to wear. They’re so cute! Well, of course they are – they’re too small.

I’ve realized that I have no real sense of what I look like when I go clothes shopping. I am constantly buying clothes for an imaginary woman who I seem to think is me. She wears trendy, figure-fitting clothes in bold prints with accessories. She has an amazing wardrobe. I know, because I house it in my closet.

My wardrobe is much more boring. It consists of the same dozen outfits I wear over and over. My real clothes take up about a dozen hangers, and they’re always in the very front of my closet, where I stand and frown each morning as I try to decide what to wear. I push them aside to see what goodies I may have forgotten in the back of my closet. The darling clothes that I will pull out and try on, then hang back up when I realize that these precious items won’t fit.

Then I grab the same, tired outfits that I know I can rely on, and I get dressed. I leave the museum collection intact, go to work, and take the same tour again the next morning.