on capsules
This fall I started doing the capsule wardrobe and it has been kind of a life changer. Lots of other bloggers have explained it better than me and are probably doing it better, too, but the basic gimmick is that you edit all your clothes down to 37 things you really love putting on your body, get rid of as much unnecessary cheap itchy yank-y spur of the moment sale purchase shit as you can, and then you shop real careful-like at the beginning of the season and call it all done for three months. I wanted to be able to get dressed in five minutes and I wanted to not walk out my front door and immediately be hit with crippling outfit regret, so I tried it, and for me at least it has really worked.
What was really striking to me, though, was that once I did it with my clothes I immediately wanted to do it in every other area of my life. I was brutal with my kitchen cabinets. I tossed a bunch of garbage makeup from 2003. And I have started thinking really, really seriously about some lifestyle and career changes to carry me into my thirties–a kind of whole-hog capsule, a way of incorporating that kind of care and intentionality into how I move through my days.
(Is this gross? It is, I know it’s gross, but I want to talk it out anyway.)
Here are things I am really bad at, a selected list: big groups of people, having weeks that are too crowded and busy, being away from home for more than three or four days at a time. I know that–I have met myself before– but a lot of times I’m tempted to do those things anyway, to buy them cause they’re on sale or cause everyone else has them or cause they feel like the kind of things I should make myself do in order to be the kind of person I think I ought to be. It’s exactly the same rationale I would use to buy a cheap dress that fits weird in the boobs and that I know in the back of my mind is going to wind up in a trash bag sooner rather than later–cause I have a party tonight and it’s trendy and on 60% markdown, or whatever.
Here’s what I’m better at, generally: long, rambling one on ones. Baking bread and taking weekend trips. Writing it all down. These are the places I want to put my energy, to spend my emotional dollars–on things that are sustainable in the long term, things that fill me up instead of emptying me out.
As this year winds down and I start to look at the next one I want to try to break myself of the habit of trying to do everything, all the time–to stop giving in to that internal pressure that’s constantly saying not enough not enough not enough. Because it is enough, it is, whether it’s 37 articles of clothing or just me here singing to myself, moving forward. It is more than enough.