T-Shirt Collection

"A person--a woman--can adapt to more than she might have thought she could.  What she's unsure about is when that stops being a virtue and turns to something else, leaving you too much changed, undefined, unanchored, like a fisherman's empty boat drifting on a river, with no way to be returned to where it belongs." --from Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

 I have accumulated a large collection of t-shirts that together tell a story of how my life has been since High School.  I still have many of my Appalachia Service Project volunteer t-shirts, including then one from the summer of 2007 which I am still proud to say has "STAFF" stamped on the sleeve.   I have a couple of Habitat for Humanity ones, too.  And a few classic UChicago puns: "I Am Uncommon!", "Where fun goes to die", a dinosaur ("UChicago") stomping on a stick-figure ("My Soul").

Going through my room yesterday to fill a few boxes for Goodwill, I was sad to finally relinquish my worn out "New Orleans: You Gotta Be Tough" t-shirt, complete with a screen print of the Superdome, a gift from a coworker.  After so many washings, and a little growing on my end, it's now much too tight across the chest.

I find it oddly fitting that my Peace Corps t-shirt spells "Cuerpo de Paz" incorrectly, and the graphics weren't printed as anticipated, making the blob on the front unrecognizable as a llama if you don't know what you're looking for.  It says to me, Hi, I'm a mess.  But I'm an awesome shade of green, so you'll wear me to work out or sleep sometimes.

I just got a new t-shirt from work--my firm is running in the Race Judicata next month, a 5k to raise money for Chicago Volunteer Legal Services, and we're all going to match.   

I went to all of these places and did all of these things and collected all of these t-shirts, and that has been my life for the past eight to ten years.  

Yes, I know they are just shirts.  But then why is it so difficult to get rid of them?

I've been thinking about adapting, and losing my way.  Wearing these t-shirts when they were new, I was putting them on to say, this is me now.  This is what I'm doing, just like everyone around me wearing the same matching t-shirts.  Collecting them over the years and continuing to wear them, I'm proud of what I was doing or had done, proud to proclaim my affiliation with an organization or school on my chest.  They are part of me now.
  
Except sometimes I worry that I let those affiliations too much define who I am.  I can match everyone around me, blend in and adapt to my surroundings.  I can track how at almost every new volunteer opportunity or school, I had to learn how to do what needed to be done, to fit the t-shirt on my back.  My pride comes from learning new things and achieving something that I might previously have thought impossible (Remember the one time I learned how to shingle a roof?  And terrified the Harvard football players with my mad power tool-weilding skillz?).  But from all of these defining moments (ASP, UChicago, Habitat for Humanity, Peace Corps), I am also left with this overwhelming feeling that I learned how to do something, but then it ended, and I'm lost without it.  Because maybe I learned how to adapt to it, rather than incorporating the experience into me.  

This is not to say that I am not enormously grateful for all of the life experience I've accumulated along with my t-shirt collection.  But did I ever give up defining myself in favor of adapting?  How do I make sure the fishing boat travels to where it belongs?