Know My T-Shirts, Know Me

This story has been percolating for a while. I haven't posted to this blog for weeks so I wanted to get something out there before more time passes. I think there's more to say here. I may get around to it one day.

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I can track my life through a series of t-shirts. 

During my youth, t-shirts from gymnastics competitions and camps were the staple. Gymnastics was the first thing to give me a sense who I was, and these shirts were my way of showing my identity to the world. These shirts said I was someone who was strong and agile. A hard worker who was competitive, the type that went to meets and won medals. My six-pack abs were hidden beneath it.

College years, graduate school, and ski bumming years were marked by tie-dye, jam band, and music festival t-shirts. These tops were purchased at head shops, in parking lots before shows, and at festivals. 

These shirts became my uniform letting folks know that I was a member of a music-loving counterculture. I was convinced that I, along with everyone else in my posse, was unique. We were not part of the mainstream and these shirt let others know.

During my ski bum days, I began volunteering at a community radio station. There I hosted a weekly music program and further established music as a major part of my identity. I hosted this show for two years and loved it, but at the same time I was losing interest in working a service job to keep my ski bum dreams alive. An unexpected job offer found me moving and beginning my working life in earnest. Leisurely days and buckets for free time were replaced with full-time, year-round work. (It pains me to type that last sentence.)

But I now had a “real” job with a salary that made travel abroad easier and trips to foreign lands because my new passion. Although I still loved music, I chose to spend less time traipsing to shows and music festivals. My priorities changed and the idea of spending four days at a music festival, while still appealing, was not how I chose to spend my limited time off. 

Life eventually brought me to Bozeman where I began volunteering at another community radio station. Here I hosted another music program and was happy to once again be able to nurture the music-loving part of my personality. At the same time, I became more of National Public Radio enthusiast. Morning Edition had long been (And still is) my wake-up alarm, but I began enjoying a wider range of NPR programming. So, my t-shirt collection transitioned and was now filled with t-shirts acquired as fund drive thank you gifts to the local radio station and the local NPR affiliate station. I was part of a new tribe, one that was liberal, community-minded, highly-educated, concerned with what was going on in the world.

Three years ago, I took a hiatus from the radio show I hosted for the previous 12 years. While I was far from being old, but I wasn’t as young as I used to be, and I was having a hard time balancing work, play, social life, and radio. I could no longer do it all. My enthusiasm was waning the last few months I hosted my show. I found myself playing the same old songs repeatedly, and I wasn’t keeping up with new music or spending time preparing for my show. Again, it was a matter of priorities. While I still loved and believed in the power of community radio, something had to give in my life and sadly radio was the thing to go.

A stack of radio t-shirts still fills my dresser drawers, but the other tops are gone. The gymnastics t-shits are a distant memory, the last of them discarded when I moved out west eons ago. They were starting to tatter, and the color was fading away like the callouses that faded from my hands when I left the sport. As for the tie-dyes and music shirts, the last two were dropped off at thrift store after a move across town a few years ago. The two survivors were a Cutler’s Records and Tapes tie-dye from my beloved college town music shop and a Loose Lucy t-shirt was purchased in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead show in 1991. Both were faded and pin-sized holes sprouting throughout the body were joining the bigger holds along the neck and shoulders. I never wore them and was only holding on to them for nostalgic purposes. It was time to let them go.

This just in - The other day a friend and I were texting about another topic and he sent along a photo of a group of us at a Grateful Dead show back in 2009. In it, I'm wearing the Loose Lucy t-shirt mentioned above!

Nothing lasts or stays strong forever. Passions wither, priorities change, identities become less pronounced, and t-shirts fade. But in one form or another, these things mark who we are and stay with us as we grow and change.

 I wonder what my next set of t-shirts will be.

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More on sense of self and more thoughts

• Becoming Me - http://annvinciguerra.blogspot.com/2018/10/awakening.html
• You are not what you drive - http://annvinciguerra.blogspot.com/2014/10/you-are-not-what-you-drive.html
• My love for NPR - http://annvinciguerra.blogspot.com/2016/05/early-morning-npr.html