what you give up to get it

"clothes make the man. naked people have little or no influence on society."
~mark twain

On a particularly slow day at work, I found myself cruising the blogs of various friends to provide a distraction to my office boredom. I came across a blog entry posted by one of my sorority sisters, Bethany, that caught my interest and I couldn't stop thinking about it for the rest of the day. She had posted a link to a NY Times article about a global social experiment called '6 Items Or Less' that challenges people to choose six items of clothing and wear only those items for a month (excluding undergarments, gym wear, and accessories like shoes of jewelry). Bethany listed the six items she had chosen for her participation in this challenge and I immediately thought, I should do this too. Then almost instantaneously, I had a completely averse reaction to my own suggestion. My inner monologue went something like this:

6 pieces of clothing for a month? That's impossible. No, it's not. Having a myriad of outfit options is not a necessity, it's a privilege. But I like having that privilege, I don't want to give that up to take part in some random social experiment. Why not? Maybe you should examine why you're having such a strong reaction to this. Ugghhhh...

And so taking my own advice, I did some reflection on why wearing the same items of clothing over the course of four weeks would be such a challenge for me. One of the conclusions I came to is that I have let the clothes I wear define me in a sense. I don't want to think I'm one of those people, but sadly I am. It's not that I must wear big name expensive designers or labels (come to think of it, I don't own any designer items) but rather I like having lots of options of different styles of clothing that I mentally put in different "life scenario" categories. So there's certain outfit options for work, then I have my 'casual hanging out at home' clothes, and then there's items that fall in more specific categories like 'going out for happy hour' or 'going to a concert' and so on and so forth. Now that I write this, I sound a little neurotic when it comes to dressing myself. And for me, that's the main point of this challenge, to force myself to forgo all the different options in my closet and stick with a slim few.

So after a few days of wrestling with myself over whether to do it or not, I decided that this kind of "fasting" would do me good and perhaps teach me some important lessons about consumerism and vanity, among other things. However, I did alter the challenge so that I could choose 12 items instead of 6. I know, I know--it's like giving up before I even started. But I knew that if I only was able to wear 6 items for a month that I would most likely not make it through the first week. So I view it as accepting initial defeat of the original challenge in order to strive towards gaining victory in a modified challenge that essentially has the same goal in mind.

I am in the 10th day of the challenge and I have felt some frustration towards being limited in my apparel choices, but on the flip side it makes getting ready in the morning a whole lot faster when my options are limited!

In the big scheme of things, this challenge could be considered petty, especially when I think about how a good number of people in the world don't even own 12 items of clothing. But that is a big part of why I want to do this in the first place--- to put into perspective how I view my worldly possessions, especially clothing, which I tend to cling to more than I should. No matter what the glossy ads in magazines tell us, I don't want my identity to be  linked with the clothes I wear because what a sad existence that would be.