letter #53 What I'm Wearing

A Series of Disparate but not Unrelated Thoughts

My dear friend

i

It seems a pity that at the very time I have finally found a fantastic answer to the question, ‘So, what do you do,’ I am in a stage of life where almost no one ever asks me.

When I sat down to write this letter to you, I had thought that I would use this recently-acquired realisation as the jumping off point for a somewhat sobering reflection on the question this raises: have I come to that point in my life where I have met almost everyone I was destined to meet? And this would in turn lead to a longer reflection on the difficult truth that life has not worked out the way I thought it would.

However, I was only three sentences in to the planned epistle, when I further realised that in exploring those questions and answers, I had bored myself nearly to death. In the place of the poetry and profundity I had imagined, what I saw instead was self-referential melodrama. So I deleted those sentences and wrote the ones you have instead read.

ii

I settled on my answer of what it is that I do during a recent episode of that most middle-aged experience: the health scare.

A health scare requires a fair bit of interaction with the health system, and as you know, anything to do with the health system involves quite a lot of sitting around in waiting rooms. Time in waiting rooms is not like time in other places, and everyone has their own way of passing this time.

Lots of people will scroll through their phones. I was trying hard to avoid this. Scrolling through apps and flicking between them leaves me uptight and jittery. This jitteriness is caused by the things that I read in the apps (especially by the constant friction and fragmentation), as well as by the actual physical scroll, and by the flicking back and forth between the apps. It all feeds into the flickeriness and fragmentation of my thinking, making me increasingly agitated. And that’s not a good way to be when you’re finally ushered into the office of a specialist or a nurse or a GP.

I used to love flicking through the magazines in waiting rooms because I do enjoy a bit of soap opera and gossip. However, two things have changed over the years. First, the trashy magazines have become too trashy even for me. And second, I have grown increasingly icked out by the ick of magazines that have been picked up and put down by countless people many of whom who haven’t washed their hands. (I do admit I’m possibly a bit over-the-top about the handwashing thing, being someone who washes her hands first thing as soon as she gets home).

I take a book in my bag if I think there’s going to be a bit of waiting, but I’m rarely able to focus in book-reading way.

Phones, magazines, books. Notebook: so to pass the time I was doing a lot of scribbling in my notebook. I’m sure these scribbles would appear chaotic to anyone looking over my shoulder but they do help me slow down my thoughts and massage them into order. And that’s how I finally worked out the perfect answer to the question of, ‘What do you do?’

iii

It’s fine I hasten to add, it’s all fine, such scares have been either just that—scares—or they have been considerably easier to address than an initial assessment might have suggested. But along the way to fine, you are necessarily reminded that life is finite, which leads a certain sort of brain to start its pre-dawn refrain: what have I done with my life, I should have done this, I could have done that.

Which is part of the reason I was once again re-considering the whole ‘So what do you do.’

iv

Two things can be true. A mid-life re-evaluation is self-indulgent and boring. But it is also profound and transformative. The following is either neither or both these things.

v

It’s not only my old thoughts that are boring me, it’s my clothes. What happened? I used to love my wardrobe. It was filled with colour and with all sorts of variations on who I might be depending on how I was feeling that day. But now I rotate through an increasingly small number of increasingly bland garments that look nothing like the way I want to see myself.

I have been reinvigorating my wardrobe. Adding the colour back in along with a few different styles. That’s how I came to buy myself something I have never owned before: a denim mini skirt. (Mini in my case being something above my knee.) And for my birthday I asked for something I’ve missed ever since I lost mine in the early 90s: an anklet.

There’s a note in my diary from earlier this year: I am wearing a denim mini skirt, an anklet with an infinity charm, a v-neck t-shirt and I am LOVING MYSELF SICK. I feel like the best kind of cross between 1985-me and 2025-me.

That sounds like someone who is not unhappy with things.

vii

Of course I write all of this in the context of the profound truth that whatever my micro truths, the global macro truth is a terrifying shitshow over which most of us have little control. Jeanette Winterson writes: “keep your mind keen and your beliefs intact.” This feels like important advice.

Take good care, and if you haven’t unsubscribed we will talk again soon

Your friend,

Tracy xx