Things I have let go of

Lately I have been thinking a lot about letting go.  I have been thinking about it both in relation to my research and my life (what I am interested in with my research is usually related in some way to what is going on in my life, whether I am aware of it at the time or not).  Two things have really got me thinking about it: one, my friend Julka helped me clean out and organize my closet and think about my wardrobe, and two, I had a conversation with my friend Marisa about observations we are both making in fieldwork about letting go.  I had been thinking about how this particular theme is the one thing that really ties together two of my projects.  An old project of mine was about how and why people decide to use a new cooking stove in rural Mexico.  Now I am doing a project on (partly) how technologies are used as part of childbirth.  One thing I have noticed in both settings is that even when a new object comes in that is supposed to represent a complete paradigm shift in the way things are done, it often does not have this effect.  In Mexico, people would get a new stove and start to use it for some things but keep all of their other stoves- they would have 2 or 3 or 4 stoves, one of those being an open fire.  In the hospital, I am looking at charting practices.  The hospital recently got a high-tech new electronic medical record program for charting.  So now they have this new program, but they still chart in two old programs plus keep a paper chart.  The process of bringing something new in often seems to involve folding the new into the old, rather than tossing all of the old objects and ways of doing things and forming a totally new way of doing something, whether it be cooking or charting in a hospital.  Marisa is doing fieldwork in a nigh-tech software company, and she has seen the same thing- we talked about how letting go is a process, and a hard process that requires conscious effort.

Cleaning my closet has been an amazing process that gives me some personal insight into this process of letting go.  While we were looking through my clothes, Julka said that she could actually see the evolution of my style in my closet, what it had been, what it was now, and how it came to be what it is.  I thought about how clothes come to be part of my life.  Some clothes just kind of find their way in without a lot of fuss, and they become like a second skin.  I don't even know they have become part of me until someone else points it out.  I have a belt that I have worn routinely since I bought it at a thrift store 12 years ago.  It is kind of an unassuming belt, but I like it a lot for some reason.  It just resonates with me.  Other clothes have an essence of giddiness or bravery- these are things that crossed a boundary.  By seeing myself as someone who could wear them, I pushed past some previous version of myself and into new territory.  These are clothes that saw me through or maybe even pushed me into some slight (or major) change in identity, helping me feel and present myself in a way that was different than what I had been doing before.  A recent example are these slouchy pleated trousers I got that feel kind of effortless and simple and a little masculine.  They make me feel at-ease but a little androgynous and tough- they're just a bit more grown-up than I was before.  I also started to think about how I put my clothes together into outfits, and how some outfits fit me perfectly at one time and then seem crazy or totally off later, but some of the parts of the outfit are things that I keep for a long time and use to put outfits together in all these different ways over time.

When it is time to let go of something, even something that no longer fits, works, or feels right at all, there is all of this other stuff to consider.  I will keep writing about it as I think about it more.  For now, I want to talk about a couple of things that I have let go of.  Someone suggested to me once that I take pictures of things I need to let go of to help me do it...

I loved these Kangaroo shoes when I was a teenager.  Most notably, I wore them on trip to Europe I took with my friend Bryan when I was 18.  I took almost nothing (literally, I packed all my stuff in the school backpack I had used to carry books in high school- Bryan's luggage was similarly spare) and this was my only pair of shoes.  I had heard it was easy to get mugged in Europe so I kept my money in the pockets on the sides of the shoes.  I thought it was a brilliant idea, although I'm sure the various people who had to take my money were less than thrilled to get stinky wadded cash out of the shoe of some dirty American kid.

I found these rather ugly saddle shoes with a stacked wooden heel captivating from the time I found them at the thrift store at age 16 through my early 20s.  They were kind of  a cornerstone of my look.  My favorite outfit for a time consisted of these shoes with some thrifted wide leg jeans and a navy blue tie-neck secretary blouse with white polka dots.  I still cannot bear to part with the blouse, although I'm working on it.  A guy I thought was really cute one time called my shoes "so tech" (this was up-and-coming lingo he had brought back to Ohio from a stint living in a bigger and cooler city) which helped to cement their position right in the center of my heart.  Goodbye, old friends.