This Is Me

-"Your self-effacing charms are shot/

-Wake up now to what you are and what you're not/

-You can run, run, run/

-But you can't escape"

-- The Helio Sequence, You can Come to Me

I got dressed to these lyrics today in my empty bedroom. How appropriate. This whole experience of preparing to move has been like having one of those police highbeams shot straight into my center, forcing it to be exposed. I feel like my insides are a maze of closets. Every time I open one up and dust off the bag of postcards or box of shoes at the bottom, another door opens revealing more dust and denial. I've got a deeper closet than I thought--both in spirit and reality. But I'm emptying it slowly, learning a few things along the way and dammit, I can finally see the floor in there.

Cleaning out seven years' worth of me from the inside of our apartment has been one revelation after another. I've reaped the mini rewards of what I call "closet shopping"--browsing the racks in the back of your closet for items you haven't seen in years. In my case, I moved in in 2001 with items I hadn't seen since 1997. A single visit to the stacking cubes in the back of mine yielded the baddest-ass purse ever, featuring a comically huge zipper on the front, 2 pairs of jeans that actually fit, some strappy faux-snakeskin sandals, and a sexy granite colored Calivin Klein v-neck. I thought, 'whose clothes are these? She has really excellent taste. Score.' Lesson: I am in fact capable of picking out "timeless pieces". Nobody will know that purse is over a decade old.

On the very same closet-diving trip, however, I found another me lurking beneath the boxes of socks. Hiding in the racks was a girl who once went to high school in the suburbs and wasn't afraid to show it. I trashed the following: a pair of white overall shorts, a Gap cardigan from...wait...1994 (I know it's that old because I stumbled across a picture from my sister's junior high graduation in 1994 where I was wearing the hideous green button-up with a pair of plaid shorts), and a t-shirt displaying the following identifier: "bad attitude", in splashy type. Gone, all of it! I was ruthless, brutal. That entire section of my life is now at the bottom of a Staten Island landfill. Lesson: it's okay to let go--especially if "letting go" involves overalls of any kind.

Closet also being timeline, I spent awhile browsing the the mid-late '90s. Those were my moving-to-New-York years and they're really fun to revisit. I unearthed: one pair of steel blue vinyl platform heels from Halloween 1997 (relics from my Pamela Anderson costume), my three inch t-strap character shoes (the most elegant dance shoes ever made), and the real jackpot: a box of letters and postcards dated from the day I moved to New York, all through my two years in school and into life after. I took a couple of hours and re-read every one. Pulled from the wreckage were: my mother's written explanation for leaving my father, a greeting card from my grandmother for every single holiday (she was so good), letters of love and adoration of the kind you can only write when you're 20 and single, and postcards from my friends who all took show tours right after graduation through Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska. They saw the entire country while I was busy figuring out how to install my first air conditioner in the summer of '97. Lesson: People have made my New York life what it is.

I'm starting to feel emptied out, liberated. I've held on to many things way past their reasonable expiration dates. Some of them need to be burned on a big, 'ol ceremonial pyre (hello, leather pants), some need to be dusted off and reshaped so they can be part of my life again, and some things need to go with me into the next dot on the timeline. Moving is exactly like those lyrics: waking up to what you are and what you are not. I'm definitely not my suburban high school shorts but I might still be a little bit steel blue vinyl. Whatever I am, I'm emptying out so I can make room for more life.