Minimalism as Body Acceptance

There is a pair of jeans in my closet, in a size that has not been my size since 2021. Folded, in the back of a drawer. Beneath them, a dress with the tags still on. The dress I bought for the version of me who would, naturally, return to her pre-pregnancy size shortly after the babies arrived. The kids are soon turning four. The dress has never been worn. Apparently returning to your pre-pregnancy size after giving birth to triplets is not that easy after all.

For years, the dress sat there as a kind of agreement I’d made with myself. The agreement was: my body is currently visiting. It will be returning to its previous form. In the meantime, I will keep this dress as both a placeholder and a motivator.

The body did not return. It did other things, some of which I’m proud of and some of which I’m still adjusting to. Three babies all at once will rearrange a person at the structural level, and I don’t just mean cosmetically. My ribs are a different shape. My feet went up half a size. But the dress stayed. The jeans stayed. A shadow wardrobe stayed, hanging quietly behind the clothes I wore, like a museum of a woman I used to be.

I am not turning this into a piece about body image in the influencer sense. What I want to cover here is the very clutter that builds up when your body changes and you can’t or won’t acknowledge it in your closet.

It’s expensive in various ways. To begin with financially, because the dress was not cheap. But it’s also expensive every morning, when you open the closet and see the clothes you can’t wear and the clothes you can wear, and have to do that small mental subtraction every single time. It’s expensive in the moment you put on the thing that fits and feel a low-grade sense of settling, because the clothes that fit feel like the consolation prize and the clothes that don’t are the real wardrobe, the one for the real body, the body you’re going to have again at some unspecified future point.

I lived in that arrangement for years without noticing. Or I’d noticed and not had the energy to do anything about it.

Now and then I was looking through the closet, picking up things I knew didn’t fit and putting them back, picking up things I knew did fit and feeling vaguely disappointed by them. And I caught myself mid-thought, and the thought was: I am dressing the temporary version of me.

The temporary version. As if the body holding up the hangers was a placeholder, and the real body was the one that would, eventually, fit the dress.

But the body holding the hangers had carried three babies and was still standing. The body holding the hangers was the actual body. The dress was not the placeholder. The body was not the placeholder. The whole framing was upside down.

It’s a small thing to say out loud and a much bigger thing to actually inhabit.

I cleared the shadow wardrobe slowly. The dress went first, partly because I was tired of looking at it, partly as a small private gesture toward the woman who was actually wearing clothes in my house. The jeans took longer because they had memories attached. There was a pair I bought during a trip to Austria. The objects were tangled up with experiences, which is the trick of the closet, and one of the harder parts of clearing it.

There was no glamorous transformation after the clean up, unfortunately. I didn’t suddenly love my body. It also didn’t fix anything inside me. But it did make my closet a place that supported my actual life instead of quietly contradicting it.

Every morning, I open the closet and the clothes I see are clothes that fit. The wardrobe agrees with the body. That sounds basic when I write it down, but it took me a while to get there, and the absence of that small daily friction is something I notice every day.

Our bodies change in many directions, and some changes are temporary, and some sizes are worth keeping for legitimate reasons. But I want to offer you a question I had to ask myself, which is:

Am I keeping this for the body I have, or am I keeping it for the body I’m waiting to have?
And if it’s the second, am I actually working toward that body, or am I just storing a hope?

A hope, stored in a closet, takes up almost as much space as a coat.