The Dive: The Uniform
On finding freedom & being reunited with myself in outfit form.
The Dive is my weekly essay to crack open a deeply personal topic in order to share resources, inspire, and uplift. I employ the pay wall to sift earnestly interested readers from an audience of looky-loos. I think of you as friends working through life right alongside me, not viewers to a performance. Welcome!
There was a version of me who got dressed for other people. Not consciously — I would have denied it at the time — but, the evidence was in the closet. An outfit for who I was meeting. An outfit for what the day was supposed to say about me. A dinner meant an hour of quiet negotiation with my own hangers: too much, not enough, trying again. Getting dressed was a small performance, staged fresh every morning for an audience that mostly wasn’t paying attention.
This became glaringly obvious when I moved to Charleston, then returned to New York for a visit.
