100 Day Dress Challenge, paying attention, stewardship, Uncategorized

Update on “The Dress,” Day 35: Travel, Creative Constraint, and Who Cares, Anyway?

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I’d fully intended to update a lot earlier, not nearly 5 weeks into this adventure, but honestly? It’s just not been a big deal. At all. Granted, it’s summer, and most days, I’m home, so the only people that really see me in the dress are my family or the handful of people I run into on my errands to the grocery store or the library. After the first couple days, I quickly realized how silly announcing my intentions with The Dress sounded and felt, so I’ve really only mentioned it once …other than here, that is. After all, one of the main points of the experiment is to fully realize just how little what we wear matters to anyone other than ourselves. People just don’t notice, on the whole. Or, if they do, it’s not enough of a pressing matter to mention or question it. Suddenly, all those mornings staring into the abyss of a closet full of dozens of things that no longer fit or that I don’t feel “in the mood” to wear feel downright silly. Dare I say, a waste of time? One of the biggest things I’m enjoying on this adventure is the removal of one of the first decisions of my day. Sure, I can dress things up with a sweater or jewelry or a scarf or shoes or whatever, but it’s incredibly freeing to just wake up, shower, throw on the dress, and be on with my day.

And travel… the other huge benefit. Some might think of this as an obstacle, traveling during the 100 days. How do you manage all of the places and climates and occasions with only one piece of clothing? Carefully, and with a minimum of luggage. Our family traveled to Washington for a niece’s wedding, for example. This was before the current heatwave they’re experiencing, but it was plenty warm nonetheless. Comfortable compared to 112 degrees (F), but warm. I packed along a sweater for the plane and air-conditioned places, but my short-sleeved lightweight wool jersey dress did just fine. I threw a small bottle of Eucalan no-rinse wool wash in my liquids bag and washed the dress in the sink a couple times over the week we were there. Washed it before bed, squeezed out the water, rolled it in a towel, hung it in the shower, and it was usually dry enough to wear by morning. I did pack along a t-shirt (black, the same lightweight wool jersey material) and denim shorts to wear in case of wardrobe malfunction or emergency (one morning the dress wasn’t quite dry enough in the morning). The shorts came in handy when we did a quick hike one evening. I tied up the dress, 80’s t-shirt style, and it was perfectly workable. The t-shirt doubled as pajamas, or, as I discovered a few days in, a way to vary things up –wear the t-shirt over the dress.

Creative constraint is another reason I was attracted to this whole adventure. Example: how do you dress up a solid plain blue knit t-shirt dress enough to wear to a wedding? Solution: I packed along a wrap skirt that’s sat in my closet far too much. It’s made of recycled saris, a mix of blue and pink with some metallic threads woven in. I wore that over the dress, added in a pair of earrings I bought years ago in Peru that I don’t wear much because they’re a little too dangly and fancy for everyday, and it worked fine. Besides, who’s supposed to be looking at me, anyway, right? The objective was to blend in appropriate. Bonus: the skirt is reversible, so I could wear it again for church if I wanted. So with the skirt, I had two options –though on Sunday I chose to pull out one of the two scarves I packed with the sweater. Blue (the color of my dress) harmonizes with all of my shoes and pretty much everything else in my closet, so I have plenty of layering options. As it was, I packed for the whole week in just one large school-sized backpack, with a little room to spare thanks to packing cubes. And no, nobody said anything about the dress the whole week. Pretty sure they noticed the repeat, but nobody said anything (which may or may not say something about how many of my family reads my blog…). So, today is Day 35, and all is going well. The only thing I’m questioning about the whole experiment is whether black would’ve been a little easier to disguise than blue.

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100 Day Dress Challenge, stewardship

100 Days in the Same Dress?

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home interior with garments on racks

The strongest influence on my clothing style was a woman I worked with years ago at the International Linguistic Center in Dallas. Miriam was (probably still is) a plain-dress Mennonite. She had five or six home-sewn dresses, all the same simple, modest-yet-flattering style but different colors and patterns. She wore her hair in a bun under a white cap head covering. I was newly married and on my own for the first time, enjoying my access to the center’s “boutique,” a kind of thrift store for the missionaries coming home on furlough and workers on the center. People on their way out of the country would donate their surplus, and people coming in would take what they needed or could use. I’d often peruse the boutique over lunch or after work, looking for new colors or styles to try out. Though I tried, I never quite could land on a “personal style,” despite having access to so many different types of clothing. One day I remarked to Miriam that I was envious of her morning routine. “It must be so easy for you to get ready in the morning,” I said to her.

She laughed. “Yes, I just open the closet and pick a clean dress, put my hair up, and that’s about it.” That conversation stuck with me over the years. This was long before Project 333 and minimalism and capsule wardrobes became popular, but developing a small, simple, comfortable, easy-care, interchangeable wardrobe became my goal. I sewed some of my own clothing back then, a habit that started when I got fed up with walking into stores with racks full of the same style in dozens of sizes. Nothing ever seemed to be quite what I was looking for. Right style, wrong fabric. Right color, wrong size. When I sewed my own clothes, I had the freedom to choose my preferred pattern, fabric, and customize the style and sizing. I had a dream of someday making my own capsule wardrobe, though I didn’t have the catchy name for it just yet.

When my kids came along, the sewing machine went into the closet, and with a body varying within a range of sizes of being pregnant, postpartum, nursing, and motherhood, I never did get around to fulfilling that goal of a self-created capsule wardrobe. If I do have a personal style today, it’s been influenced by the simplicity I saw manifested in Miriam’s dresses: neutral or coordinating colors, simple clean lines, comfort, timeless style, and the best quality and workmanship I can afford. As I’ve learned more about the conditions that are necessary to provide America with cheap clothing in such huge quantities, I added sustainability and concern for justice to those qualities. Most of my wardrobe today is thrifted, either through local shops or online shops like ThredUp and Poshmark. The average American discards 70 pounds of textile waste a year, I’ve read. I figure if I can make use of perfectly good clothing that would otherwise be bound for the landfill, that’s a win both in the financial and the sustainability categories.

And that brings me to my discovery of the 100 day dress challenge. I loved the idea from the moment I read about it a few months ago. I did Dressember a few years ago (my Canadian cousins-in-law still participate every year), and I loved the simplicity of just putting on one thing in the morning. No coordination choices, no uncomfortable waistbands. The biggest challenge I had was keeping my legs warm on cold days (easily accomplished with the discovery of fleece-lined leggings). I’ve honestly never found jeans to be truly comfortable. Easier to move in, maybe; warmer, yes, but comfortable? No. And especially not comfortable since my body has morphed from a 20-year-old size 8 to its current state somewhere between size 12 and 14 (16 if the pants are particularly judgey). As Anne Lamott says (I paraphrase), life is too short for pants with an opinion. Whoever invented leggings (which are still NOT PANTS, by the way) has my gratitude.

So, what’s this 100 day dress challenge? I’m planning to wear one dress (yes, one) for 100 days straight. The dress I’ve chosen is the short-sleeved Maggie style from Wool&, the company that’s sponsored the challenge for the past year or so. It’ll be the most expensive piece of clothing I own, but I have (and love) two dresses that are similar to this style already. They’re a much flimsier material, however, and after a couple years of heavy wear (and the fact that I bought them second-hand), they’re already showing signs of wearing out soon. The dress is wool, which should help with wearability in both hot and cold temperatures and help with stretching out the time between washings. As I learned when I made some felted wool cloth diaper covers when my kids were little (yes, we used cloth diapers –a load of laundry took as long as a trip to the nearest Walmart and cost a lot less), wool is magic for its antibacterial properties and for wicking away moisture (and, therefore, odor). I expect the dress will have the same qualities, as others have attested. …But, of course, I plan to wash the dress several times over the 100 days. Others have gone as long as the whole 100. I really don’t think that’ll be realistic (or desirable) in a Minnesota summer.

The dress is on the way, due to arrive early next week, so once it comes, I’ll be putting a daily selfie on Instagram for accountability. One thing I hope this challenge helps me to do is learn to accessorize, something I’ve never quite mastered. I have a few scarves and a few simple pieces of jewelry that get me through, but I really would love to do more fun things with them and maybe find a couple more pieces in my closet and drawers that would help me stretch what I have in my closet already once the challenge is done.

But more than that, I hope that I can prove to my kids and remind myself of something I realized somewhere in my mid-twenties: people are usually so concerned about themselves that they don’t care nearly as much as we might think about what we wear or do. Once I realized that myself, it liberated me from my self-consciousness, and it enabled me to spend less time being self-focused and more time and energy thinking about things that mattered more.

Oh, and since I begin in June, my challenge doesn’t end until September, so I get to continue my 100 days at work (teaching college English) as well. It’ll be fun to see whether anyone notices (quite possible, I’d assume, since my class has to look at me every day). I’ve already joked with my last semester’s class that they’ve probably already figured out my entire work wardrobe by two weeks in. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like my high school English teacher who was known for never wearing the same outfit twice and a pastor who wore the same green striped tie every single Sunday for over a year, I’ve already developed a reputation as that prof that always wears the same three dresses. And I think I’m okay with that.

Find me on Instagram: @shelbigesch to follow along.

*This post does NOT contain affiliate links, mainly because I haven’t figured out how to do it and I’m not sure that’s what I want to do with this little spot on the internets yet, anyway.

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Coronavirus Diaries, Uncategorized

The Regenerative, Endangered Power of Boredom

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woman wearing red sweater lying on snow covered ground

Boredom is a dying art.

One thing I’ve gleaned from this pandemic is the necessity and power of leaving room for boredom. I was reminded of this as I checked the school closing lists on our local television station’s website this morning. Even snow days aren’t sacred any more –about half of the “No School Today” notices posted included a second line: “e-learning day today.” Even our kids are compelled to work from home (beyond the generational curse known as homework, that is). Whatever happened to snow days that meant snow angels and sledding and sleeping in?

We’ve forgotten how to stand in line or sit in a waiting room and just …be. It seems people have forgotten how to take those in-between moments and stare into space. Give us thirty unoccupied seconds, and we reflexively reach for our phones. Even meditation –the ultimate modern example of “productive boredom”– is something we search for on our Headspace app and not in the very real space around ourselves, beyond our phones.

Like many others, I brought my classroom home with me in March when the world shuttered and hunkered down against the Covid-19 virus. My husband’s been working at home since March as well, and likely will be for at least the next few months. It’s been much harder on him than on me, to be honest. He’s the extrovert, I’m the introvert. That said, it’s really been a tough year for all of us, as our daughter came home from college, our son who is in high school a half-hour north of where we live started doing his classes online, and my other daughter who’s done her studying from home for all of her high school experience has needed to adjust to a house full of familial distractions. Now, we get along quite well as families go. We’re not yellers, and conflicts are usually held to a simmer when they happen, but in a relatively small house, finding our own space is still a challenge.

And not only finding is physical space tough, but temporal space is hard to find as well. By late April, I learned to keep work hours, to build a daily routine that allowed me to save those evening hours for non-work endeavors. Even with that though, I’ve done very little writing since March. Part of that’s the post-graduate-school, adjusting-to-work-life lull, but part of it’s just craving the empty space of not being obligated to do anything. Margin. The ability to take an hour to aimlessly research things like local hiking spots or the relative futility of modern weight-loss methods or how to build a capsule wardrobe. Reading a book just because it looks interesting and not because it’s something I should be reading –and the guilty pleasure of not writing something I really don’t care about that much simply because it’s been nearly a year since I’ve had anything published.

I’ve become suspicious of the creeping dread of obligation in defense of deliberately reclaiming some empty space in my day. I’ve learned to find the place in the day where my work day fits, and to not let it go further. Since my second semester teaching, I’ve added a note on page one of my syllabi outlining my “email hours.” I explain to my students that if they email me before 7am or after 11pm or any time on a Sunday, they shouldn’t expect a response right away. It’s a reasonable, common-sense boundary, but even putting that in writing has helped remind me that working from home doesn’t necessarily mean 24/7 availability. I dumped social media apps from my iPhone long ago, but two months ago, I finally deleted my Outlook and Gmail apps from my phone. I highly recommend the practice.

So, what am I getting at? I hope that we’ll all let this pandemic work-from-home revolution (if we want to call it that) become an opportunity to revisit the importance of boredom. I hope that we’ll learn that setting hours and boundaries is an essential practice while working from home, but also quite possible when we all move back into offices away from home.

Maybe we’ll learn to turn off all those blasted notifications on our phones. Maybe we’ll try a digital Sabbath once in a while. Maybe we’ll go on a long walk and leave the phone and earbuds at home. Maybe we’ll unplug the internet router for a day and see if our family can survive the experience (confession: I haven’t yet had the courage to try that yet). If we relearn how to be bored (perhaps starting by learning to stand in line and look around ourselves instead into our phones), perhaps we’ll all come back to work –whether that be home or office– refreshed, regenerated, and reminded of the reasons why we go to work in the first place.

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