Rumpled

Essays

Oct 19

There have been times in my life when I wanted to fall down and crumple myself into a paper ball. Sometimes it’s to hide in plain sight, unnoticed near a wastebasket; other times, it’s to curl in on myself and feel small. There’s nothing wrong with feeling like this. You don’t have to feel like a champ every single day. Some days you may want to just climb to the back of your closet for some privacy.

I don’t like wrinkled clothes, but there’s something comforting about picking up a rumpled sweatshirt from a pile of worn-once clothes and throwing it on for a morning walk, not caring who you might see or what they think of the creases across your chest. Wearing a sweatshirt once without staining it or sweating through it is sacrilege. Sweatshirts feel better the more you wear them over and over.

I feel the same about dress shirts because I wear an undershirt. One use is not enough. I am no longer sweating through shirts and suits while trying a murder case on a 102-degree day in Fort Lauderdale. I am just walking through the world with buttons on my shirt. There’s no reason to send that shirt to dry cleaning after wearing it to sit in my office alone for five hours on a Thursday.

When I watched the Frank Gehry documentary, I was enthralled by the way he could make a building feel architecturally significant and bedraggled at the same. Like a balloon with half its air out, but in a building. Other people see his designs as sharp and modernistic, but to me, many are just intentionally disheveled.

When I watched Rick Rubin’s documentary on Shangri-La, I spat at myself for always making sure my hair was done. I don’t use a hairbrush, but I use my hands and a small amount of product to shape my hair the way I want every morning. But is that what I want? Rick Rubin looks like he has never considered what his hair looks like. I want to be like Rick.

I want to feel unaware of what anyone else thinks of what I wear or how I dress, but then I try to create an outfit. I try far less than I used to, but I still try. My socks help because about ten years ago I decided to put all my socks in a drawer, unpaired, so I could randomly select two of the same length each day with no matching allowed. It has reminded me to be less rigid.

No one gives a shit about your rumpled sock.