In the last two weeks I have been doing something that I rarely do, and enjoying it - buying clothes. I can spend hours delightedly browsing book stores, searching for the one book, letting my fingers linger on the smooth new covers of hard and soft backs, touching the pages of a virgin book with a reverence usually reserved for the divine, and inhaling the aroma of freshly printed words. For me, being in a bookstore is a refuge.
However, buying clothes has been an effort in useless time consumption. There is little that frustrates me more than seeing endless aisles of similar looking, similar feeling, regiments of shirts, pants, sweaters, and suits that confuse my senses and make me feel wholly inadequate when it comes to choosing and dressing myself. And then there is the ultimate trial of my faith - the changing room.
It is in the changing room, an as tiny space as possible, that the hyperventilating begins. I have to breathe in to fit, not only into the space, but sometimes into the clothes that I have over-optimistically chosen for myself. And once that exercise has been completed, I have to then emerge to gaze upon myself in the mirror on the outside of the door. That wouldn't be so bad, if half the store was looking at and evaluating me at the same time that I am going through that process. The other day I had complete strangers offering me their assessments with wild hand gestures and using an assortment of fingers. They assumed that I couldn't speak or understand Chinese and these non-verbal communications, I must admit, quite adequately served their purpose. I would slink back into the hyperventilation space, remove the offending garment and put on another one that I hoped would elicit a quite opposite response.
Nonetheless, by the end of this clothes shopping experience I had purchased an assortment of life-changing apparel. This has only really become apparent as I have worn my newly acquired costumes in the days that have followed and people who know me well comment on how much I seem to have changed. And how handsome I look now! I shudder to think what they thought of my looks before this, but their out-spoken praise has given me a new sense of confidence and hence the enjoyment I alluded to in the beginning. And this enjoyment has resulted in a determination to keep my cupboard up-to-date.
There is a famous line, from someone not so famous, at least not to me because I don't know who first said it, that clothes make the man. A friend of mine said the other day that she could see the change in my looks and actions, but wondered if these exterior changes reflected genuine changes in my mind and character. My response was that change is a process and the first change is how I feel about myself when I look different and people notice me. Moving from a caterpillar to a butterfly is a time consuming metamorphic process. But it is a process that has begun in me.
17 August 2004
Dion Marc Delport