Spring Clean Your Way to a Better You

The first warm day inspires pedicures and a low-key dissatisfaction with everything I decide to put on my body.

I have a ritual I perform the first very warm day of every year: I leave my home in my “light” jacket. If I’m feeling brave, I wear sandals. I go for a walk, relishing in the feeling of sweat beading on my brow, grumbling happily to myself that, yes, this is what it feels like to be warm again. I buy something cold to drink and gamely sit in a park, ignoring the breeze that still carries a hint of winter and stay for as long as I can, until my allergies get too bad and I have to go home. Spring and summer are hell after a month or so, but in the first early weeks, when the novelty of wearing a sundress is still fresh, it’s the best time of the year.

Rewards for enduring the agony of a long winter are varied. Watching the sun set later every night and leaving the office when it’s still light out is one. Drinking a very cold iced tea and walking around until sweat beads on your upper lip and you feel sufficiently sweaty is another. And, standing in front of your closet, gathering armfuls of clothing you wore last year and throwing them into a garbage bag so you can buy more is the best reward of all.

My patterns have developed over the years, but I’ve only recently begun to notice them in time to catch them before I start. The first warm day inspires pedicures and a low-key dissatisfaction with everything I decide to put on my body. Though it is maybe 62 degrees in the sun, I try on bathing suits and dresses, cataloguing what I own and how to get rid of something to make room. “Of course I need a light jacket,” I tell myself as I stand in Old Navy, clutching the sleeve of a jacket that looks suspiciously similar to what I’m already wearing. “This summer, I will wear culottes and crop tops and nothing else,” I say, confidently gathering armfuls of wide-legged pants and shirts that I would never wear out of the house. With each purchase, a clear idea of the new person I will become forms. I will wear shorts and sneakers without feeling like a German tourist. I will experiment with overalls. I will successfully execute a full day in a romper. My spring self requires clothing not yet stained or torn or ripped, but fresh and new.

Spring cleaning is an act of catharsis in many ways: flushing out the things we accumulate over winter, items purchased as a balm against snowbound weekends or driven indoors because of cold. The point of spring cleaning is to declutter, to throw away the plastic bags and not to accumulate more items, but to dispose of what you no longer need and carry on. But, every spring without fail, after I’ve cleaned my closet of worn out tee shirts and sundresses with barbecue sauce on the placket, I find myself at my computer, sipping a seltzer and opening endless tabs of dresses and sandals, wondering who I will be this summer.

For the most part, seasonal wardrobes are bullshit. Yes, if you live in a place where there are seasons, then it makes sense that you’d have more clothes. While I liked very little about San Francisco save its vistas and its burritos, the weather was always consistent. The heavy down coats and snow boots I dragged across the country with me went unworn, and though it felt wrong to wear the same thing on the 4th of July as on Christmas, it was okay. My wardrobe was a streamlined assemblage of clothes to be layered: light sweaters, medium-weight jackets, all that could be removed and shoved in a tote when the fog rolled in. Layering is a particularly frustrating exercise in futility, a Sisyphean effort towards being comfortable. It is a terrible way to live and so I moved.

Moving back to the East Coast reminded me that seasons exist. Clothing accumulated—the result of fitful shopping trips shoved into drawers and hung in closets. My wardrobe expanded only because the weather required it. After a year or so, I had clothes for all seasons. That should’ve been the end. But, the urge to update my wardrobe and by extension, my life, rises in accordance with the temperature. I am in thrall to the need to purge and rebuild.

It’s wasteful and surely bad for my finances, but I can’t resist. Every year, I feel compelled to edit, making tiny adjustments to what I wear as a way of correcting for the changes I haven’t necessarily made as a person.

The fact is, I don’t need anything, but this urge to buy and replenish and refresh isn’t powered by need. The desire for a yearly reinvention fuels the tax return shopping trips. The promise of changing one of the factors that add up to happiness with the swipe of a debit card is seductive. I know that the chugging machine of capitalism powers my desire, every year, to buy what’s in the stores every year, whether or not I need them.

But, changing the way you dress is the shortest path to reinvention, a way of shaking things up somehow even if nothing much has changed in your life. Becoming a person who wears overalls with confidence is a journey that’s not meant for everyone. Buying the overalls and wearing them at least to the grocery store without feeling the need to turn around is a small step towards change. New clothing is movement in a direction — right or wrong is irrelevant. Sometimes you need to change in small ways before you can change on a larger scale, the various incremental changes adding up until you’ve subtly shed your skin for another.

Soon, the weather will even out and it will be consistently warm again. I have already bought some clothes and have thrown more away. I’ve allowed myself a few purchases — sandals, a dress, a backpack — that will hopefully get some use. I will do my best to wear what I have and I will be okay with it.

Megan Reynolds is an associate editor at The Frisky. She lives in New York.

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