The Pink Cardigan
I put on my pink cardigan today. Pulling it from the bin beneath my bed, struggling with the clasps that hadn’t been undone in years.
The last time I wore this cardigan was 5 years ago. There is a photo of me standing on a street corner, a hair wrap hiding the hair I was already losing, braced against my walker. It was the first time I’d gone more than a few steps since my liver transplant more than a month prior.
The cardigan was a gift I’d received during those early ICU days, when I was in and out of consciousness and survival wasn’t guaranteed. The bright colours had reminded the giver of me. The only thing was after that incident I felt like I’d lost my brightness.
I’d become muted in the name of survival. It had taken everything from me just to keep going. And so the cardigan became a painful reminder of what I’d lost, and how hard I’d worked towards surviving, and was relegated to the box under the bed. I couldn’t part with it, but I couldn’t wear it again.
Clothes hold memory.
The morning before I dug it out, I spent time reflecting on the girls I'd been before. I thought of all of the different shapes I’d contorted myself into in an effort to belong, the ways I’d self abandoned. I studied my features in the mirror and memorized the ways I’d strived towards softness, palatability and fitting in instead of expanding out into my full shape.
In the practice of somatic entering, there is a prompt in which we centre into our width, or the widest parts of self. I had a teacher ask me once what taking up right sized space might be like. What would it be like not to over inflate and take up too much space with ego or shrink to a skeletal version of self but to occupy enough space for the fullness of self to have breathing room?
It’s a prompt I’ve since asked many a student, and have chewed on slowly for myself.
In the medical world, compliance is prized. A good patient is one who is agreeable, nice, who absorbs each impact with a smile and never wavers. I have always always wanted to be good. Even if it meant betraying myself. Even if it meant swallowing my no, rejecting how I really felt.
During my most recent hospital stay, there was a moment at which I became hysterical. I was offered an anti-psychotic, because of course. I was being disruptive. But underneath the rising panic and the nervous system that bordered on crashing out, underneath feeling the weight of every single violation that had occurred over the last days and weeks, every time I’d outsourced what I wanted to follow their plan because I bought into the belief someone outside of me knew better than me, I felt pride.
I'm feeling it. Don’t you know that? I’m feeling all of it. I’m not being good anymore, I’m just alive.
It’s like Mary Oliver said, of what if we don’t have to be good? What if we just get to embody the fullness and complexity of our human experiences?
A cardigan can’t speak those things, but sometimes I wonder what she would say if she could. Clothing myself in the brightest pink, in the tiniest way, felt like coming back to the self I’d abandoned in the name of preservation.
