to be sorted later #22
in which I faced reality (and my mother) in a Zara fitting room
This past Saturday was International Women’s Day, and I was feeling weird about it.
For a solid week or more, my brain has been on information overload, as I’ve been consumed by a new role at work. So consumed, in fact, that I had woken up every night around 2 a.m., and then again around 4 a.m., thinking about a project or a presentation or agonizing over some random bullshit I had said to one of my new direct reports on that given day. (I beg, I plead, can someone tell me a different word for this so I don’t sound and feel so exceedingly fucking stupid?! “Direct reports.” Gross.)
But we don’t come here to talk about work! So — Saturday. International Women’s Day! That’s great! I also was really, really tired and woke up in a mood. I couldn’t turn off my work brain, still. I was also missing my mom in an extremely specific way, because every time I’ve looked in the mirror since cutting my hair a couple of weeks ago, she meets me in the mirror, but it’s not her, it’s just me. Annoying.
So I put on my new, extra-baggy jumpsuit that makes me feel like a younger Lily Tomlin as Frankie and I took my tired, annoyed, looking-like-my-deceased-mother self to The Art Institute. Soon, I was strutting around, free in my oversized outfit, and feeling re-energized. Art! Holy shit!
After I left the museum, the sun was shining, and I was feeling great. I strutted some more, through Millennium Park, dodging the tourists taking selfies, and decided to keep walking to the art store, and buy some collage materials. I felt like such an artiste!
From there, I was feeling so good, having so much fun on my little outing, that I made an absolutely insane decision to wreck that feeling entirely:
I went into Zara and tried on some jeans.
I must preface what I’m about to say next with two key facts about me: 1) I’ve been in absolute confusion/denial about my jeans size for the last two years, since — ahem — gaining some weight and 2) I have not been in a dressing room in years, as I prefer to order my incorrectly fitting clothes online and then get mad in the privacy of my own home when they inevitably don’t fit.
In the tiny-ass dressing room (Are they always this narrow? Can I get a door and not a curtain that doesn’t close entirely?! Am I going to die here?!) I wiggled out of my baggy jumpsuit, deeply concerned I was going to fall backwards through the curtain, exposing my half-naked, pale self to the long line of other [presumably also insane] women waiting their turn. As I tried to force a pair of “Mom” jeans that were clearly not my size over my hips, I caught myself at all angles in the mirrors, my womanly self.
Reader: I did not love it. I sunk into the feeling of deep despair that only a woman under the fluorescent lights of a fitting room, realizing the jeans will not fit, can understand. (Happy International Women’s Day, everybody!)
Then, I looked myself in the face, and I snapped out of it. My skin was glowing! My Glossier Black Cherry lip balm was popping! Mostly, my mom was there again, and this time, I wasn’t annoyed about it at all. In my mind, I heard her laughing at me, saying, “Get a bigger size.” I grinned back at me/us.
I put my baggy clothes back on, and I got the hell out of there.
When I’m not waking up in the middle of the night, strutting through the Art Institute, or losing my mind in a fitting room, what the hell am I even doing?
What I’m Sorting Through, Currently …
Staying Up Late to Finish Committed: On Meaning & Madwomen
To counteract my previous week of waking up throughout the night, this week I’ve been staying up too late to finish one of the most fantastic memoirs I have ever read: Committed, by Suzanne Scanlon.
This book, largely about Scanlon’s three-year stay at New York State Psychiatric Institute, but also about her mother-loss grief and her love of literature and her survival, hit so close to home for me that I texted my brother Jay last night: “It’s rather unnerving how much I am relating to Suzanne Scanlon in Committed.”
(I had gifted Jay a signed copy of Committed for Christmas this year, and he had since read it and urged me to bump it up on my reading list. I get it, Jay! You were right again. No wonder our mother used to remind me every ten minutes that you’re a genius.)
It’s honestly wild that I gifted my brother this book rather than keep it for myself. He might be the genius, but turns out, I’m the hero: After all, I read Girl, Interrupted a frightening amount of times in high school and as you know, think about The Bell Jar all summer long. I also deeply relate to everything Scanlon writes about her grief, as well as her mother’s long illness (she was 8 when her mother died of breast cancer). You can read more about the book here, and here’s a favorite moment:
“Reading saved me. It can sound ridiculous, embarrassing to say this—you may be accused of being grandiose, romantic, or worse. But it can be true, we all know this, and it was true for me.”
On Repeat
“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it,” Jason Isbell sings on my favorite track on his new solo acoustic album, Foxes in the Snow. The lyrics in this song are so, so good — as they are throughout the album, cause, duh, this is Isbell — “Why y’all examining me like I’m a murder suspect?”
But you’ve really gotta hear it, to catch that inflection every time he sings, “broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”:
An easy description of Foxes in the Snow is to call it his divorce record, but as Ryan Leas puts it for Vulture: “Foxes is not a simple divorce record…Equally populated by grief and new beginnings, it instead captures the messiness in moving on.”
I don’t know what happened between Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires, because that’s none of my damn business. But after listening to Foxes in the Snow approximately 7 consecutive times last Friday evening while cleaning my apartment, I felt compelled to also listen to some Shires, too. It seemed only right, as a fan of both of their music.
So here’s a song of hers I love as well, that I find equally devastating:
Good grief, this is feeling dark. Follow up all that heartache with this playlist of mine and perk up. It’s almost spring! I’m ready to go for all my silly lil’ walks and listen to this!
to be sorted later” is a series in which I attempt to have fun on the internet again, namely, by sharing the latest things I am watching, reading, listening to, hating, loving, discovering, and otherwise sorting through in any particular week or season. Enjoy! Or don’t!
previously:
