Dear World: Nobody Has Time to Do Laundry When You're Busy Making Yourself Come...Alive

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

My underwear are extremely small.

This is not because I am small. This is because I am defeated.

My underwear are always a dead giveaway, because…well, there are none. None clean. None folded. None to be found, um, anywhere.

Not even in the big pile of laundry. I know you have a big pile of laundry. If you don’t have a big pile of laundry just waiting to be folded somewhere, you work for the IRS. (Or you’re the kind of monster who actually knows how to fold a fitted sheet.)

My “big pile” is in this one bedroom that I made into my closet. I thought a whole room would keep me organized, because big room = big closets = big expectations for one’s self. Finally, I shall color coordinate the sweaters!

Except a big room just means you can fit an EVEN BIGGER PILE OF LAUNDRY IN THERE, just waiting to be folded, stuck in this state of existential wrinkly despair.

So, anyway, I have now resorted to wearing…the small underwear. The kind you bought because “I’m 40 now but am terrified of letting myself go, so why don’t we get back into G-strings??????” And then you buy 20 pairs from Skims, all in black, because you are THAT DETERMINED, and then they sit there in a crumpled up stringy ball in the back of the drawer, mocking you for your ridiculous naivete.

Until today. Until the day comes that you ran out of the comfortable granny panties you are still deliciously wearing. And you must put on this new/old identity of yourself. AND WEAR THE G-STRINGS.

Isn’t it funny, how we normalize things?

When I first arrived to the farmhouse here in the country (this makes me sound like Orphan Annie, doesn’t it? Like I’ve been taken in? I suppose I should say, “When I first purchased the farmhouse.” Much more adult. Start again, you feral wannabe.)

When I first purchased the farmhouse here in the country, I was the broad showing up at the truck stop diner in pearls. I was neat and polished and I had my fingernails painted gloss and I’d walk in with these blazers on and very, very cool boots from England. A girl always needs very, very cool boots from England.

Other people in the truck stop diner are usually not so keen. Like the man scooping up his breakfast potatoes with his hands. Or the woman harassing me with 600 photos of dead, stuffed raccoons.

But, having lived in cosmopolitan cities around the world, I used to consider a white button-down blouse & tights to be “dressed down.” (This one from Athleta is my absolute FAVORITE. It’s long and lightweight and sweat-wicking so I wear it around the farmhouse and go about my day, and try to fool people into thinking I’m put together.)

And so, I kept going to breakfast—you know, the place where I learned about “check writing,” lol—wearing my signature casual-but-sophisticated city armor.

Until I (re)discovered………

…….the hoodie.

Oh no.

I did.

I rediscovered the hoodie.

There is something very nostalgic about a hoodie, like you’re instantly transported back to 1998 when your crush let you wear his, and you felt like lightning. Hoodies are the kinds of things you wear when you still go get ice cream cones and talk to your friends for hours-long marathons at night and have very hard things to decide, like whether you should burn a CD about him or for him, and if you should offer him a ride back from the football game.

Wearing this hoodie rewinds time.

As has buying this farmhouse in my small, rural hometown.

Sometimes I wonder if the real reason we take radical left turns in life is because we are no longer excited about the one we’re living. That disappointment is a slow burn, building quietly in your psyche, making you seek weird, stupid thrills like overeating a bowl of pasta, or rebelling against your schedule, or breaking your own rules just to prove you still have free will, or flirting with chaos just to feel your pulse again. Maybe these are little cues, little symptoms, not of being an irresponsible anal gland of a human being, but of being one simply desperate for wonder. For life to surprise you again. For things to feel like they did when you first put on that sweatshirt and jumped in the leaves and giggled with your girlfriends and said yes to prom.

Perhaps the reason I came here, and bought this farmhouse, and took this very big leap of faith (as a nomad for the past 20 years, THIS WAS WEIRD), is less because I wanted a testing ground for my new obsession with houses, and more because I wanted a new testing ground for myself.

Somehow, somewhere inside, I think we all know that we have lost parts of ourselves we never intended to.

Were you brighter then?
More hopeful?
Less cynical?
More adventurous?

Were you the kind of person who jumped in blind and said, “screw it, it’ll work out!”?
Were you someone full of electricity?
Were you free-spirited, with a big heart, and an easy laugh?
Were you happier then?

Sometimes, taking a radical left turn is about turning the car the fuck around and going back for the person you left for dead.

It’s not regressive when you’re reclaiming yourself; it’s the most progressive thing you can do, because it means that this time, you get to pick. You get to be in charge of designing your life. I will be a cosmopolitan business shark AND ALSO be a country bumpkin when I damn well feel like it. I will run a modern online company and know more about tech than the entire fucking town, and I WILL ALSO put on overalls and leave my phone in a drawer and go ride through the woods on a muddy four wheeler. I will teach people how to use the internet to chase after their biggest, brightest dreams, and I WILL ALSO go into the garden and chase after my biggest, brightest tomato.

I will wear pearls with sweatshirts.

I will wear blazers with hardware store boots.

I will reinvent myself over and over and over again.

And I will do it all while wearing the world’s smallest G-string, because nobody has time to do laundry, when you are busy lighting little fires, to make yourself come alive.

P.S. Speaking of laundry, I just Googled “how to fold a fitted sheet” and now I feel so much worse about myself. THANKS FOR THAT, UNIVERSE.

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